A treatise of Japaning and varnishing, being a compleat discovery of those arts.

With the best way of making all sorts of varnish for Japan, wood, prints, plate or pictures. The method of guilding, burnishing and lackering, with the art of guilding, seperating, and refining metals, and the most curious way of painting on glass, or otherwise. Also rules for counterfeiting tortoise-shell, and marble, and for staining or dying wood, ivory, &c. Together with above an hundred distinct patterns of Japan-work, for tables, stands, frames, cabinets, boxes, &c. Curiously engraven on 24 large copper-plates. By John Stalker. Oxford : Printed for, and Sold by the Author, living at the Golden-Ball in St. James’s Market, London, in the Year 1688. Folio (380 x 240 mm), contemporary full calf (rubbed and worn), later marbled endpapers, ex libris of H.P. Kraus; title within double-ruled border, the variant noting only Stalker as author (there are three other variant titles: two indicating the joint authorship of Stalker and Parker, and one with Parker’s name alone), pp [x], 1-68, 24 engraved plates, 69-84; marginal repairs to G and G2; a few plates with mild discoloration and 9,10, 21 and 22 with small repairs; a very good copy.

The first edition of this comprehensive guide to Japanese lacquering techniques of the period. The suite of twenty-four plates by an anonymous artist includes sixty designs of flowers, birds, insects, and landscapes in the oriental manner, suitable for furniture and small objects. Surviving copies are often incomplete due to artisan-owners having removed patterns for use as transfers, at the author’s own suggestion.

Although it had been preceded by William Salmon’s Polygraphie, or the Arts of Drawing, Engraving … Varnishing, Gilding … (1672), Stalker’s manual was to remain for a considerable time the principal reference work in the West for Japanese lacquering techniques.

Wing, S5187C