Netsuke - Fitzwilliam

This small exhibition brought together 250 superb examples of netsuke - a form of miniature sculpture originating in 17th-century Japan. These often elaborately carved items were designed to function as ‘toggles’ for the silk cords upon which Japanese men strung their pipes, purses or writing implements. These webpage take you through the collection of the Fitzwilliam.

Traditional Japanese clothing does not include pockets. Instead, items are suspended from a belt by means of a cord. A toggle (netsuke) at the end of the cord prevents it from slipping through. The types of sagemono (suspended objects) used in this way include medicine containers, pipe holders and tobacco pouches. In the 18th century and early 19th century, netsuke and sagemono were important components of Japanese costume, and were symbols of social status. A well-dressed gentleman in Japan seldom appeared on the street without a carefully considered ensemble of netsuke and sagemono suspended from the sash of his garment.

To run locally

• Install Jekyll on your machine following these instructions
• Install Git on your machine following these instructions
• Clone the code for this repository: git clone https://github.com/FitzwilliamMuseum/fitz-netsuke.git
• Install the gems bundle install
• Change to the directory and then run this command in terminal bundle exec jekyll serve

Credits

Website by @portableant

License

GPL V3 for code, CC-BY-NC-SA-ND for content (text and images) unless stated otherwise.

Contributing guidelines

If you want to contribute fixes to this site, you are very welcome to do so. To do this, either add a bug report under issues or fork the repository and create a new branch for proposed fixes and then submit a pull request.