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Satsuma style vase depicting a bird perched on a cherry tree
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Details
- Associated place
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Asia › Japan › Honshū › Osaka prefecture › Osaka (Yabu Meizan kiln-site) (place of creation)Asia › Japan › Kyūshū › Kagoshima prefecture › Kagoshima (probable place of creation)Europe (probable original location)
- Date
- c. 1910
- Artist/maker
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Meizan Workshop (active 1880 - c. 1914) (potter)probably Yabu Meizan (1853 - 1934) (enameller)
- Material and technique
- earthenware, thrown, with polychrome overglaze enamels, including gold
- Dimensions
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25 cm (height)
9 cm (diameter)
- Material index
- Technique index
- Object type index
- No. of items
- 1
- Credit line
- Purchased with the assistance of the Story Fund, 1993.
- Accession no.
- EA1993.12
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Further reading
Impey, Oliver, and Joyce Seaman, Japanese Decorative Arts of the Meiji Period 1868-1912, Ashmolean Handbooks (Oxford: Ashmolean Museum, 2005), no. 21 on p. 46, p. 7, illus. pp. 46-47
Impey, Oliver, ‘Reflections upon the Arts and Crafts of Meiji Period Japan with Reference to the Collection of the Ashmolean Museum’, Oriental Art, 42/3, (Autumn 1996), p. 12, illus. p. 13 fig. 5
Glossary
earthenware
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earthenware
Ceramic material made of clay which is fired to a temperature of c.1000-1200⁰c. The resulting ceramic is non-vitreous and varies in colour from dark red to yellow.
Location
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Second floor | Room 36 | Japan
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Second floor | Room 36 | Japan
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Publications online
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Japanese Decorative Arts of the Meiji Period
Earthenware vase decorated with a bird perched on a flowering cherry tree, watching a spider descending on a thread among autumn leaves. Signed on the base with the seal mark: Yabu Meizan.
Yabu Meizan (1853-1934) was a decorator, not a potter; the ceramic body was bought in as a blank, probably from Kagoshima. His factory in Ōsaka produced Satsuma-style overglaze-decorated pieces, specializing in the minute depiction of large numbers of figures in processions. For this, he used copper templates many of which have survived, though their use is extremely difficult to detect. At the Japan-British Exhibition at Shepherd’s Bush in 1910, he exhibited pieces both in his old style and in a new, much more open style, such as that of the vase here, While the critics praised the new style (‘contemporary’), the public preferred the old style even though it was very expensive.
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