A fine study of a snail by Sari.
Signed in a reserve Sari 左里.
4.4cm High.
For a previously sold example in the last 5 years please see link
Sari was a brilliant artist in every sense of the word. His surviving body of work appears to divide into two distinct stylistic modes, though whether these represent separate chronological phases or parallel approaches remains uncertain.
The first is a more naive manner, in which the conceptual force of the subject takes precedence over strict formal resolution. The works in this vein possess a charm that is almost without parallel in netsuke art. The second, to which the present snail belongs, is a finer and more meticulous mode, distinguished by an extraordinary concentration of detail. In carvings of this kind, Sari ranks with the finest netsuke artists of his generation.
A Japanese historian once shared information with me suggesting that Sari had apprenticed under Tametaka, who died in 1794. The netsuke themselves - our largest body of evidence - lend support to this view, since a number of designs are known both with Tametaka signatures and with Sari signatures on otherwise identical works.
Tametaka is associated with the Nagoya area in the Soken Kisho. By contrast, Sari's connection with Iwashiro appears to rest largely on Frederick Meinertzhagen's belief that the Sa (左) of Sari's name corresponded to the same character in Hidari Issan (左一山), who was thought to be associated with that region. This is a tenuous basis for attribution, though it should be said in Meinertzhagen's defence that as a cataloguer he was attempting to impose order on difficult material. It was later generations, more than Meinertzhagen himself, that treated this classificatory system as if it reflected historical reality. In truth, the assessment of netsuke through stylistic inheritance and secondary signatures remains at a relatively early stage, and further discoveries are surely yet to come.
