LONDON.- Bonhams Fine Japanese Art sale in London on Thursday 11 May includes masterpieces in two of Japan’s most distinctive media: lacquer and screen painting.

Among the lacquers are two works by Ogawa Haritsu (1663-1747), each estimated at £30,000-40,000, demonstrating the artist’s fondness for unusual materials and novel subject-matter. Encrusted with lacquer, pewter, pottery, silver, and shell, one box features sparrows making a nest while the other depicts a caparisoned elephant and a dancing Chinese boy.

A set of boxes by Fujiwara Ogetsu (died 1938) is decorated in a gorgeous combination of gold and silver lacquer and shell with motifs from a No drama that tells the story of a fisherman who takes possession of a magical feather mantle left behind by a celestial nymph, but agrees to return it when she performs a dance for him. Applied with a minutely worked metal model of the mantle, the boxes are estimated at £25,000-30,000.

The paintings section of the sale includes a four-panel folding screen featuring an early Chinese warrior, Zhangliang, about to receive a scroll of military secrets from a mysterious figure called the “Yellow Stone Elder.” Dramatically executed in ink on paper, the screen was painted by Soga Shogetsu, an associate of the individualist painter Soga Shohaku (1730-1781), famous for his bold ink composition and powerfully expressionist figural delineations of Chinese legend. It is estimated at £10,000-15,000.

Bonhams Director of Japanese Art, Suzannah Yip, said: “Western collectors’ love affair with Japanese lacquer started in the late nineteenth century when works by Shibata Zeshin (1807-1891), another artist featured in our May sale who often copied Ogawa Haritsu’s style, first came on the market. The boxes by Ogetsu are outstanding examples of the extravagantly decorated but little-known lacquer wares that continued to be made through the first half of the twentieth century. Like Ogawa Haritsu, Soga Shohaku was admired for his uncom-promising originality. We are especially pleased that our May sale includes a masterpiece of individualist painting by his most outstanding disciple.”