A Maki-e Lacquer Large Plate with Orchid Design by Naonobu

Lot description

Provenance: 1. Ugo Alfons Casal Collection 2. Osaka City Museum of Fine Arts Ugo Alfons Casal, Swiss-German origin, was born in Florence, Italy in 1888. From 1918 to 1920 he worked at the Osaka branch of George H. McFadden & Brothers, and from 1920 to 1938 at F. S. Morse & Co. in Kobe. After coming to Japan, he was mainly involved in the cotton trade. Except for several years in Yokohama, he spent most of his life in Kobe until he passed away on July 9, 1964. Since his arrival in Japan, Casal has remained in the country and continued to collect Japanese art. However, in the late 1930s, as relations between Japan and the United States deteriorated, he planned to move his collection to America together with his family. In the winter of 1941, the collection was packed and brought to a warehouse at Kobe Port, ready to be loaded onto a ship bound for the United States. Yet the scheduled departure was slightly after December 8, 1941—the day the Pacific War broke out—so the shipment never materialized. Instead, the collection, still stored in wooden crates, was moved from the warehouse to the Osaka City Museum of Fine Arts through his personal connections. As a result, with the exception of a few small items, the majority of the works remained stored in wooden containers in the museum’s third-floor warehouse throughout the wartime and postwar years. After Casal’s death, the collection was bequeathed to the Osaka City Museum of Fine Arts.