Featured Old Chinese Hand Painted Wooden Bowls

I was given a set of 7 bowls (originally 8 or 10 apparently but nobody knows for sure) around 15 years ago by my Great Grandmother who said her Uncle had been given them as a gift in China when he was a television development consultant for The People’s Republic of China about 1959/60 ish and brought them back to NZ around 1968. He brought back a fairly large amount of things, most of which were rather valuable and quite old.
But nobody seems to know much about these.
They’re quite light and sound like wood when tapped, one has a couple of chips in the rim that also look to reveal wood.
Each is around 12”-12.4” in diameter at the top and between 8” and 9” diameter at the bottom. Each stands between 5” to 5.5” tall. There is a little variation between them all.
They don’t seem to have any stamping or markings on the bases (although there is a single brush hair in one and an odd almost triangular set of dots on another that both seem to be under the coating of black haha).
The art is clearly hand painted with visible texture and brush strokes and there is clear age and usage wear. The paint has some fading, thinning and discolouration here and there as does the black coating that I would assume is a lacquer.
I remember my great grandmother using them as trinket trays for years so the usage wear seeming to come from hand oils and liquids wasn’t recent.
I have absolutely no clue if they are something considered “fancy” or just something a coworker friend of his picked up somewhere random to give him, while he had many many treasures he was also the type to value all kinds of odd things.
If anyone knows anything about them or has any clues on where I could look or what to look for I would really appreciate the help!
I can add more photos if it’s helpful but I think the rules post said to limit to ten.

 

Beautiful. They are Japanese, but could have been acquired while in Asia.

You can post more in your next post, there is no limit in a single thread.

 

Very nice Japanese lacquerware. The lacquer, known as "urushi" in Japanese, is applied in layers onto the wood base. The colors in the decoration are made with pigments mixed into the clear urushi. The gold decoration on the goldfish and crane may be examples of "maki-e", created with powdered gold.

This website, for a Japanese company that produces traditionally decorated fountain pens, provides a nice introduction to the techniques -

https://www.kyuseidotokyo.com/libraryofknowledge/urushi-maki-e-and-kintsugi

 

What a lovely set of bowls. Welcome to antiquers Visabella!

Linda

 

Very nice...Welcome!

 

Those are lovely. I'd treat them a bit more gently than your great-grandmother did.

 

20th century unsigned lacquer doesn’t typically bring large sums. Yours are particularly good quality and good size. Your best bet may be to search eBay sold listings for Japanese lacquer bowls and average out the sale price of the better quality content. The fish bowl would likely be the most desirable, followed by cranes and cherry blossoms. The subject matter is important. Very nice pieces. Sounds like the fella had an interesting collection.