japanning

Japanese lacquerware — urushi — uses the sap of the Toxicodendron vernicifluum tree, which is native to East Asia and does not grow in Europe. When Europeans first encountered Japanese lacquer in the sixteenth century, they were astonished by its depth, hardness, and luminosity. They wanted to reproduce it. They could not. The raw material did not exist on their continent. So they invented substitutes using shellac, seed lac, and various varnishes, and they called the result 'japanning.'

Japanning became a fashionable craft in seventeenth-century England. In 1688, John Stalker and George Parker published A Treatise of Japanning and Varnishing, which taught English gentlemen and gentlewomen how to decorate furniture and household objects with a lacquer-like finish. The book included patterns to copy — pagodas, birds, flowers — and instructions for building up layers of varnish. The result was recognizably European, not Japanese, but the name stuck.

Pontypool in Wales became a center of japanned metalware in the eighteenth century. The Allgood family developed a method for japanning tin plate — coating it with layers of lacquer and baking it in ovens. Pontypool japanware was exported throughout Britain and the American colonies. Trays, boxes, and tea caddies in black and gold lacquer finishes were produced by the thousands. The technique was Welsh. The name was Japanese. The connection between the two was aspiration rather than achievement.

The word japanning faded in the twentieth century as the technique fell out of fashion. It is now an antiques term — a collector's word for a specific kind of eighteenth-century European imitation of East Asian lacquer. The real Japanese lacquerware, urushi, continues to be produced using techniques unchanged for centuries. The imitation named itself after the original. The original never noticed.