Pair of seventeenth-century Japanese lobed wooden bowls, lacquered on inside in red and outside in gold with a butterfly and geometric decoration. Fitted with nineteenth-century French gilt-bronze mounts, with a pierced rim, a tripod stand with a central barley-sugar column, and three foliate scrolls with hoof feet, on a tripartite base with ball feet.

Bowl with rounded sides, fluted inside and gadrooned outside, the interior stepped in the centre and similarly underneath, where a foot or boss may have been removed. The outside gadroons painted in gold, on RCIN 3156.1 alternately with cash roundels and with a band of lozenges containing formal blooms, and on RCIN 3156.2 with lozenge and bloom bands alternating with repeated butterflies; the inside lacquered red. The bowl (which no doubt once had a cover – see Commentary) mounted at the rim with a vertical gilt-bronze band of pierced circles and lozenges containing quatrefoils, above a rope-twist and plain moulded edge. Resting on a leafy calyx supported on a central twisted column with berry finial, sitting on a triangular base engraved with scrolls of acanthus on a pounced ground. At each angle, a scrolled and reeded acanthus stem support, ending on the base below in goat’s hooves, held together at mid-point by a double cord. The curving triangular base with a heavily cast foliate border, standing on three ball feet.

The bowls once had covers but they were later mounted and turned into pout-pourri vases. A very similar bowl, complete with its cover, is in the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, without mounts and having thirty lobes. It is dated to 1630-50.

Text adapted from Chinese and Japanese Works of Art in the Collection of Her Majesty The Queen: Volume III.