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Lot 1156
NAMIKI: Emperor Rankaku Eggshell Fountain Pen *PROTOTYPE*
16 June 2015, 10:00 PDT
San FranciscoSold for US$27,500 inc. premium
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NAMIKI: Emperor Rankaku Eggshell Fountain Pen *PROTOTYPE*
A fascinating and rare prototype Namiki Emperor pen fully decorated with fragments of quail eggshells in the difficult and exacting rankaku technique. The rankaku technique was developed to allow the use of brilliant white on black lacquer pens (black lacquer is highly resistant to white pigments). The technique requires breaking and meticulously reassembling quail eggshell fragments one by one. The difficulty of mastering this technique, particularly on the curved surface of a pen, makes rankaku the province of the most highly skilled artisans. A sensational pen.
In his indispensable book The Four Seasons of Namiki, Christophe Larquemin writes of the difficulty of working in the rankaku technique: "It requires the artist to arrange tiny pre-cut pieces of eggshell on the lacquer in a process that is tremendously painstaking. This is why only a very small number of items can be produced. This is also why [these pens are] specially valued by collectors who regard [them] as the ultimate contemporary Namiki[s]. [The] high price is easily justified by the many lacquer techniques applied to [the] long production process."
Broad 18K gold nib, large #50 size, engraved with Mt. Fuji device. Outer box, wooden display box, ink bottle, service guide and various other papers, Namiki DVD.
This pen was created as a prototype, and it was never produced in numbers for commercial release. It is of the greatest rarity, and may indeed be the only example of its kind.
In his indispensable book The Four Seasons of Namiki, Christophe Larquemin writes of the difficulty of working in the rankaku technique: "It requires the artist to arrange tiny pre-cut pieces of eggshell on the lacquer in a process that is tremendously painstaking. This is why only a very small number of items can be produced. This is also why [these pens are] specially valued by collectors who regard [them] as the ultimate contemporary Namiki[s]. [The] high price is easily justified by the many lacquer techniques applied to [the] long production process."
Broad 18K gold nib, large #50 size, engraved with Mt. Fuji device. Outer box, wooden display box, ink bottle, service guide and various other papers, Namiki DVD.
This pen was created as a prototype, and it was never produced in numbers for commercial release. It is of the greatest rarity, and may indeed be the only example of its kind.