TATSUKE KOKOSAI: A RARE LACQUER FOUR-CASE INRO DEPICTING A CAT AND BUTTERFLYBy Tatsuke Kokosai II, signed Tatsuke Kokosai 田附交々齋 Japan, 18th-19th century, Edo period (1615-1868)Bearing a reddish-brown ground, finely decorated in mostly gold and silver togidashi-e and hiramaki-e with nahiji and hirame to depict a cat teasing a butterfly while another flutters around a clump of wild flowers on the reverse, the interior of nashiji with gold fundame edges. Each case is inscribed to the interior in black lacquer with a character, reading ‘Shi’, ‘So’, ‘Cho’, and ‘Mei’. The base signed in gold lacquer TATSUKE KOKOSAI. HEIGHT 9 cmCondition: Good, worn condition with minuscule losses to edges and risers, minor rubbing throughout. Provenance: Kunsthandel Klefisch, 11-12 October 2013, Cologne, lot 873. A private collection in Rhineland, Germany, acquired from the above. Cats and butterflies are symbols of longevity. The word for cat in Chinese (mao) is a homophone for the word for octogenarian, and the word for butterfly (die) sounds the same as that for a septuagenarian. Thus, the combination of the cat and butterflies here conveys the wish that the recipient might live a long life of seventy or eighty years. It is common for Japanese artists to borrow such symbolism from the Chinese visual vocabulary.Auction comparison: Compare a closely related four-case inro by Tatsuke Kokosai II, decorated with the same design on a roiro ground, 7.6 cm high, dated 19th century, formerly in the collections of Michael Tomkinson (no. 1152) and Edward A. Wrangham (no. 1516), at Bonhams, The Last Treasures from the Edward Wrangham Collection of Japanese Art, 19 July 2021, London, lot 83 (sold for 5,100 GBP). This inro is also recorded in Wrangham, E. A. (1995) The Index of Inro Artists, p. 140.