Fuchi-Kashira: Teikan - Tiger and Dragon Design

A tsuba of Kaei 4 (1851), carved with two of the Twenty-four Paragons of Filial Piety, Yang Xiang on the face and Zhu Shouchang on the reverse, is the earliest dated work of Ōkawa Teikan, and the published sources note that he made it at the age of twenty-three. Teikan was born at Mito in Bunsei 11 (1828), the son of Motosada, and his common name was Yasuke. His father was a pupil of the first Taizan Mototaka, the leading master of Mito metalwork, and the sources count Teikan the second generation of the Ōkawa line that Motosada began. He is said to have learned carving from his father, and later served the Mito domain as a retained craftsman (kakae-kō). After his father's death he left Mito for Edo and lived at Mukōjima.

His signatures record a long and varied working life. He prefixed the surnames Tachibana and Minamoto, in later years also called himself Kanju, set the words Usetsu, Usō and Rōsetsu before his name, and used the gō Chikuzanken, Shihō, Tensui and Hōen. His dated works fall mostly between the Keiō era and the Meiji, some adding place names such as the Sumida River and Tōeizan, and from the pieces themselves he can be followed to about Meiji 30 (1897). Signed works survive from the age of about twenty-four to one signed at seventy. His own son Teiju succeeded him.

The judgment the published sources return to is a single one: "his unerringly precise carving is well established, and he handles every carving method with mastery"[[c:1]]. On the Kaei tsuba, a shakudō ishime-ji plate of rounded-square form, he builds the scene in usuniku-bori and takabori, organizing the difference in height with skill, and his colour inlay is exact. The gold inlay of the tiger's fur and the robe patterns, the rock face on the front and the brushwood fence on the reverse are points of detail, and the sources find that "the figure work, the true strength of Mito metalwork, is rich indeed"[[c:2]], the tiger's expression no less so. They call the piece a work full of narrative and well composed, and "a tsuba that may be called the representative work of the smith"[[c:3]].

He worked as readily in a single metal. A mokkō tsuba of Keiō 2 (1866), signed with the gō Shihō, carries a pair of male and female dragons in high relief across the upper face, the lower part left open so that the two seem to leap through space; on the reverse, Mount Fuji in sukidashi takabori sits below a Chinese poem in praise of the peak. The shakudō has the wet-crow black of fine metal, and the sources write that "this work, rendered in purple-black shakudō alone without any other colour, is truly beautiful and powerful"[[c:4]]. A set of mitokoromono signed Suifu-jū Chikuzanken Teikan shows the Kurikara dragon in takabori on an exact nanako-ji, with gold and silver colour inlay. The dragon coiled about the sword and about to swallow it from the point is "full of movement and force"[[c:5]], and the sources close: "down to each single scale and the tips of the claws, a fine piece in which an unerringly precise carving technique is displayed"[[c:6]].

The last register is the complete mounting in gold. Two koshirae of Meiji 5 (1872), signed in Edo, one by the Sumida River and one by the Otonashi River, carry fittings made by him as single sets. On a wakizashi koshirae the fittings are worked in peony branches on solid gold in sukidashi takabori and openwork, the menuki a parent-and-cub lion pair; the sources praise the harmony of the gold peonies with the gold-dusted scabbard and call it "a work brimming with the pride of bakumatsu Mito metalwork"[[c:7]]. On an aikuchi koshirae the fittings carry flowers of the four seasons with insects in polished gold, inlaid with shakudō and silver, the menuki a grasshopper and a beetle, and the sources find the balance between the grain of the scabbard and the gold-coloured flowers and insects exact, a work of high dignity.

Teikan's record stands on five Jūyō designations from the forty-seventh session to the seventieth: two tsuba, one set of mitokoromono and two complete koshirae with fittings by his hand. None is recorded with a provenance or an institutional holder, and none stands above the Jūyō rank. His best-known works are thus in private hands, and the sources treat them as documents of the full bakumatsu Mito idiom, from the narrative figure work of his youth through the monochrome dragon of his maturity to the gold mountings of early Meiji. A signed Teikan of this standard is encountered only from time to time, and the dated pieces, which fix his age and his place, are the ones collectors of Mito work look for.