NETSUKE TIME AND PLACE

netsuke

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• Object
• netsuke
• Museum number

HG.686

• Description

Ivory netsuke. Kettle with landscape and tea utensils.

• Producer name
• Made by: Gyokuhosai
• Date
• 19thC
• Production place
• Made in: Japan
• (Asia,Japan)
• Materials
• ivory
• Dimensions
• Height: 2.4 centimetres
• Width: 4 centimetres
• Depth: 3.5 centimetres
• Inscriptions

o     

• Inscription Type

signature

• Inscription Comment

Gyokuhosai

• Location

G91/case7

• Exhibition history

2012 Sept – 2013 Jan, BM Gallery 91, ‘Ritual and revelry: the art of drinking in Asia'

• Conservation

See treatments 

• Subjects
• tea production/trade
• landscape
• Acquisition name
• Bequeathed by: Anne Hull Grundy
• Acquisition date

1978-1984

• Department

Asia

·        Registration number

HG.686

According to the British Museum, an institution I trust implicitly, the netsuke pictured above shows three effects of sake (rice wine), namely, Sadness, Euphoria and Fatigue. 

I’m no expert on netsuke and no one’s eyesight is good enough to read the details in the object at hand from a photo.  Consequently, I’m content to take the BM's summary at face value, wondering however why Sadness leads off the trilateral description.  

In my own experiences with sake and drunkenness, Euphoria comes first, followed by Fatigue.  Fortunately, I rarely experience Sadness in the drunkenness context, although I clearly remember that the first time someone told me about netsuke art, as well as his personal netsuke collection, I became very Fatigued and Sad (or Sad and Fatigued, I forget the order) because I was uninterested in what he was saying and it seemed a Neverending Story. 

My lecturer was also at the time generously serving me from bottle-ends of various Chateau d’Yquem vintages in his dormitory  room on the second floor of Mary Lyon 3 at Swarthmore College, a glamorous and unusual event in those unprepossessing surroundings.  G. had collected this rare and exquisite wine, which I had never tasted before, at a New York City wine tasting he had just attended with his father, the person who originally encouraged him to begin "collecting small" (you can't collect many things smaller than netsukes) as training for eventually  "collecting big."  I knew and liked the father and, characteristically,  he was giving his son good advice.

I would be very interested in recommencing the netsuke conversation now, but it would probably be over tea because I’ve lost the head for alcohol. 

And Euphoria.

Kevin Ayers: Everyone's Sometime and Some People's All The Time Blues (June 1, 1974 perfomance) 

Kevin Ayers: I'm So Tired (from That's What You Get, Babe) 

A North Wind Is Preferred For Cheesemaking; South Wind From The Sea Is Best For Maturing

I.  Does this great cheese, so glorious at best, need butter?  It has been a deplorable but common custom in France to mix butter with Roquefort, making a spread of it.  In my Breton guise, as if hailing from the banks of the great River Rance), I am used to eating butter under cheese (like the Normans), but mixing it, never. It spoils both.  As a possible child of Rouergat ancestry (near Roquefort there is the “le tout petit ruisseau nommé Rance," as another Rouergat described it to me), I regard butter as quite unnecessary with any Roquefort I choose to eat; but some demand it to take the edge off such cheeses as the sharper also-rans of the Gault-Milau race.

Roquefort

          As for wine, let any who have felt uneasy when accompanying Roquefort with red wine other than port try sweet or very fruity drier white wines.  Chateau d'Yquem is the perfect but extravagant counsel of some great gourmets.  Closer to hand, and more reasonable, are Périgord’s Montbazillac, Banyuls and Rivesaltes rancis.  In England a sweet old dark ale or barley wine would do well, especially out of doors.

A fleurine in a Roquefort cave.   It is through the complex system of interconnected cracks or faults known as fleurines that the air runs through the Roquefort caves, maintaining constant conditions of wetness (95-99%) and temperature (7-11°C).

II. All the laiteries belong to the Roquefort cave proprietors.  Weather conditions are charted daily, together with detailed timings of each stage of cheesemaking, and the amount of rennet and pennicillium used.   Even the wind direction is tested, by the wet-finger method, and recorded. A north wind is preferred for cheesemaking because it is cooling for the dairy; traditionally making might “wait for the wind.”  South wind from the sea is best for maturing, being the only one to penetrate the fleurines and create the necessary movement of moisture and spores throughout the caves.  

A Roquefort cave

          Monsieur Albert Alric told me that Papillon laiteries keep similar charts and pointed out that if a customer complains and gives the date and vat of marking, it is possible to trace the conditions in which the particular cheese was made and all the details of its making to see whether the fault lay with the laiterie or the caves.   Dairy workers are paid for the whole year, although they do not have to work in the period when no milk is being collected.

A Roquefort laiterie 

          “There are eight stories below us,” Monsieur Laur said as we left his office and started descending the old staircase down into the caves.   The servants’ staircase, it might be called, for people are only here to serve; the cheeses are the masters for whom the lift is reserved.  It is salutary to think back to the days when they had to be carried up and down the stairs. Through the dimness, giving way to darkness away from the stair-shaft, only the cheeses seem to give off light against the deep, damp-saturated oaken uprights and shelves.  Chill moisture is the constant factor, together with the invisible spores, the two combining to create and nourish a greasy floor and stair covering (take sensible, non-slip shoes and wooly clothing, and do not dig your heels in).  On the south wall the naked rock is split by the irregular fleurines, great sinister cracks occasionally letting through the merest gleam from an upper, outer world.

1929 Château d’Yquem – 5 * -- Michael Broadbent

"A deep, rich amber, some [bottles] a rose tinted tawny; peaches and cream ride uppermost, also apricots, peeled sultanas, sometimes slightly chocolatey, always richly penetrating." 

"The perfect but extravagant counsel." 

Live a little, I say (hopefully).  The end is near.  If not, live a little (I say hopefully). Seana (below) clearly wants to.

From Patrick Rance:  The French Cheese Book.  Macmillan, London, 1989.