Bronze Crab From The Edo Period

Bronze crab from the Edo period
Bronze
Japan
Edo Era
6.5 x 19 x 9.5 cm (2.5 x 7.5 x 3.75 in.)

During the Cernuschi Museum’s 1986 exhibition devoted to “Animal Art in the Time of the Last Shoguns,” six crabs, or kani (蟹), of varying but nearly identical sizes were presented — though sadly without sufficient description in the catalogue. We do know, however, that all had been part of the “thousand bronzes brought back by Cernuschi” which, exhibited in 1873 at the Palais de l’Industrie, “struck the public’s imagination” (Paris, 1986, p. 9).

Indeed, the very fact that these okimono (置物) come from the collection assembled by Henri Cernuschi during his long journey of 1871 to 1873 indicates that they are works dating at the latest from the very first years of the Meiji era, and more likely — as stated in the catalogue of the 1986 exhibition — objects whose “dates of manufacture [span] the entire Tokugawa shogunate, that is, the Edo period, from the 17th to the 19th century” (ibid.). Kani of this type, non-articulated, have thus come up for sale catalogued as dating from the Edo era, which their relative technical and formal simplicity seems to confirm, when compared to the more numerous kani of the Meiji era, which are generally articulated — that is, jizai (自在), more detailed and more finely chiselled.

The dimensions of the present crab bring it close to the fourth largest kani in the Cernuschi Museum (M.C. 2146); it is worth noting that the largest crab in the series, a monumental and non-articulated piece (M.C. 2156), was dated to the 17th century by Louis Gonse in his major survey L’Art japonais (Gonse, 1883, vol. II, p. 59).

See Louis Gonse, L’Art japonais, vol. II, Paris, 1883; Marie-Thérèse Bobot et al., Art animalier au temps des derniers Shôgun. XVIIIe-XIXe siècles. Animaux d’Edo. Fonds Cernuschi, Paris, 1986; Akiko Mabuchi, “Cernuschi et sa collection d’Okimono,” in Ebisu. Études japonaises, no. 19, 1998.