Chikubōsai made this basket with madake bamboo and rattan, using the techniques of bundled plaiting, twill plaiting, bending, wrapping, and knotting. Incised signature on the bottom reads Chikubōsai made this....
Chikubōsai made this basket with madake bamboo and rattan, using the techniques of bundled plaiting, twill plaiting, bending, wrapping, and knotting. Incised signature on the bottom reads Chikubōsai made this. The basket comes with a copper liner for ikebana use and a fitted kiri-wood storage box.
This style of flower basket appears to have been pioneered by Chikubōsai’s contemporary Tanabe Chikuunsai (1877–1937) who based his design, in turn, on miniature versions made by Hayakawa Shōkosai I (1815–1897), one of the pioneers of art basketry in western Japan. Such baskets are sometimes referred to as fruit baskets, but in this case the presence of a waterproof copper liner suggests that the basket was intended for a flower arrangement. The use of tabane-ami (bundled-plaiting), a technique pioneered by the great avant-garde bamboo artist Iizuka Rōkansai (1890–1958) in the mid-1930s, indicates that the present basket is a masterpiece made late in Chikubōsai’s career.
Another basket of this type by Chikubōsai, again with a bent handle (which is however made from a rhizome rather than a stem of bamboo) is in the Snider collection at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; see Kazuko Todate, Fired Earth, Woven Bamboo: Contemporary Japanese Ceramics and Bamboo Art from the Stanley and Mary Ann Snider Collection, Boston, MFA Publications, 2013, p. 108.