Tsuba made of red bronze with three dice in negative silhouette and four dice in shallow silver and shakudō inlays on each side.
Featured on PDR in the collection Photographs of Japanese Sword Guards (1916)
In the mid-1890s, after health problems forced him to give up landscape painting, Georg Oeder (b. Aachen, Germany, 1846) threw himself into collecting Japanese art and artifacts — above all ukiyo-e prints and sword guards (tsuba). His collection of tsuba, which was one of the most extensive in the world at the time, was photographed and printed in a catalogue published in 1916. This catalogue is now almost all that remains of Oeder’s collection, most of which was auctioned off or lost after his death in 1931.