Note: Crafted in Kyoto's lacquer workshops, coffers and cabinets decorated in gold hiramaki-e and shell were among the earliest Japanese artefacts to reach Asian, American and European markets, starting two or three decades after the first landfall by Portuguese adventurers in the mid-sixteenth century. Celebrated today for their lavish, innovative technique and dense ornamentation inspired in part by wares from other parts of Asia, such pieces brought the Japanese genius for design to global attention and ensured that the word 'Japan' would be synonymous with 'lacquer' right down to the present day.

Traded along newly opened global sea routes—the Internet of the late Renaissance—Japanese lacquers offered European monarchs and nobles a distant glimpse of the splendours of the Momoyama age, when great warrior leaders like Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1537-1598) took overall control of their country. Hideyoshi and his rivals and vassals ordered lavish use of gold—not just on lacquer wares but on folding screens as well—to brighten the gloomy spaces of their magnificent palaces and castles.

The present form of coffer with domed cover, nicknamed kamaboko (fish sausage) by modern commentators, was only briefly fashionable and gave way to the flat-topped chest during the second and third decades of the seventeenth century as the Portuguese presence in Japan waned and Dutch traders began to play a more prominent role. 

For other examples of similary decorated Nanban coffers from the same period (late 16th/early 17th century), see Jorge Welsh, After the Barbarians: Namban Works of Art for the Japanese, Portuguese and Dutch Markets, London and Lisbon, Jorge Welsh Books, 2008, pp.316-325, no.43 and no.44.