footing in the sixteenth century and sent home
specimens of native work, there was probably very little of Japanese
manufacture which found its way to Europe. The beautiful lacquer work of
Japan, which dates from the end of the sixteenth and the following
century, leads us to suppose that a long period of probation must have
occurred before the Arts, which were probably learned from the Chinese,
could have been so thoroughly mastered.

Of furniture, with the exception of the cabinets, chests, and boxes, large
and small, of this famous lac, there appears to have been little. Until
the Japanese developed a taste for copying European customs and manners,
the habit seems to have been to sit on mats and to use small tables raised
a few inches from the ground. Even the bedrooms contained no bedsteads,
but a light mattress served for bed and bedstead.

The process of lacquering has already been described, and in the chapter
on French furniture of the eighteenth century it will be seen how
specimens of this decorative material reached France by way of Holland,
and were mounted into the "_meubles de luxe_" of that time. With this
exception, and that of the famous collection of porcelain in the Japan
Palace at Dresden, probably but little of the art products of this
artistic people had been exported until the country was opened up by the
expedition of Lord Elgin and Commodore Perry, in 1858-9, and subsequently
by the antiquarian knowledge and research of Sir Rutherford Alcock, who
has contributed so much to our knowledge of Japanese industrial art;
indeed it is scarcely too much to say, that so far as England is
concerned, he was the first to introduce the products of the Empire of
Japan.

[Illustration: Japanese Cabinet of Red Chased Lacquer Work. XVII to XVIII
Century.]

The Revolution, and the break up of the feudal system which had existed in
that country for some eight hundred years, ended by placing the Mikado on
the throne. There was a sale in Paris, in 1867, of the famous collection
of the Shogun, who had sent his treasures there to raise funds for the
civil war in which he was then engaged with the Daimio. This was followed
by the exportation of other fine native productions to Paris and London;
but the supply of old and really fine specimens has, since about 1874,
almost ceased, and, in default, the European markets have become flooded
with articles of cheap and inferior workmanship, exported to meet the
modern dema