Hayashi Kodenji

To understand Hayashi Kodenji, it helps to understand the world he entered. Japanese cloisonné enamel — shippō, literally "seven treasures" — had no continuous tradition of three-dimensional manufacture until the 1830s, when a former samurai turned metal-gilder named Kaji Tsunekichi acquired a piece of Chinese cloisonné, patiently took it apart, and worked out how it had been made. From those early reverse-engineered experiments in Nagoya grew one of the most remarkable episodes in the entire history of the decorative arts: a craft that within a single generation went from tentative domestic curiosity to the object of international obsession, filling exhibition halls in Paris, Vienna and Chicago with work of a fineness that astonished Western collectors and critics alike.

Hayashi Kodenji was born in 1831, the grandson-in-craft of that founding moment. He trained under Tsukamoto Kaisuke, himself a pupil of Hayashi Shōgorō — a direct line of transmission from Kaji's pioneering workshop. In 1862, still a young man, he established his own independent cloisonné workshop in Nagoya and began training craftsmen of his own. It was a decision that placed him at the centre of what was rapidly becoming the most concentrated production of decorative art objects Japan had ever seen. The area around Toshima on the outskirts of Nagoya was transforming into Shippō-chō — cloisonné town — and at its peak it accounted for an estimated seventy percent of all cloisonné production in Japan.

What distinguished Kodenji from the industrialists around him was a combination of technical mastery and commercial tenacity that was, even by the standards of the Meiji period, extraordinary. Stories survive of him walking the entire distance from Nagoya to the port of Yokohama to sell his wares directly to foreign traders — this at a time when a longstanding prohibition on the sale of copper, the material from which the bodies of cloisonné objects were made, made any such transaction legally precarious. He found his way through regardless. He was, as the auction house Sotheby's has noted, "as well as an innovative enameller, an astute businessman" — a combination of qualities that proved decisive in taking Japanese cloisonné to a genuinely international audience.

He was also instrumental in the formation and leadership of the Shippō-chō enamellers' guild, uniting the craftsmen of the region into a collective body capable of representing and advancing the trade. His work appeared at the Paris Expositions of 1867 and 1878, the Vienna Exhibition of 1873, and continued through to the St Louis World's Fair of 1904, where he was awarded a gold medal — a span of international exhibition spanning nearly four decades, with prizes including silver at Nuremberg in 1885 and silver again in Paris in 1889. In 1912, the London auction house Glendining sold over three hundred cloisonné enamels from the Glasgow Exhibition, offered directly by K. Hayashi of Nagoya, a testament to both the volume and the reach of his operation.

He worked closely with his son, Kodenji II, for over forty years — a collaboration so close that distinguishing the work of the two makers is, in many cases, effectively impossible. Signed pieces bearing the inscription Dai Nihon Hayashi Kodenji zo — "made by Hayashi Kodenji of Great Japan" — carry a pride of authorship that speaks to how Kodenji understood his own place in the story of his craft. He was not a workshop turning out export goods: he was an artist who happened also to be building an industry.

He died in 1915, at the age of eighty-four, having spent more than half a century at the heart of Japanese cloisonné's golden age. The pieces that bear his mark — worked in fine silver wire, their grounds deep and saturated, their natural subjects rendered with a fidelity that still arrests the eye — stand as evidence of what the Meiji period, at its best, could do: take an ancient technique, inherited from China, and remake it into something entirely, unmistakably Japanese.