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Woman breast-feeding while eating from her bentō, or food box
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Details
- Associated place
- Date
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modelled 1903 - 1904
Meiji Period (1868 - 1912)
- Artist/maker
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Udagawa Kazuo (active 1900 - 1910) (caster)
- Material and technique
- bronze figure; wooden bench
- Dimensions
- 58 x 62.3 x 51.7 cm max. (height x width x depth)
- Material index
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processed material › metal › alloy › copper alloy › bronze,
- Technique index
- Object type index
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furniture/furnishings › furniture › seat › bench,
- No. of items
- 5
- Credit line
- Purchased with the assistance of the Story Fund, 1989.
- Accession no.
- EA1989.14
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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. 32 on p. 68, p. 9, illus. pp. 68-69
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. 11, illus. p. 11 fig. 1
Location
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- currently in research collection
Objects are sometimes moved to a different location. Our object location data is usually updated on a monthly basis. Contact the Jameel Study Centre if you are planning to visit the museum to see a particular object on display, or would like to arrange an appointment to see an object in our reserve collections.
Publications online
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Japanese Decorative Arts of the Meiji Period
Bronze figure of a woman cradling a baby on her knee. She holds chopsticks in her right hand and is stretching out to reach a food box (bentō) containing rice, placed on a cloth beside her. She sits on a rustic wooden bench with her bare feet on the ground. Signed underneath: Udagawa Kazuo saku.
The mother has presumably just finished breast-feeding her baby, and is now eating her lunch from her bentō box. The naturalism sought by the sculptors trained at the Tōkyō Art School, where Natsuo [EAX.3852] and Shōmin [EA1998.220] taught traditional metalworking skills, was much influenced by the Italian sculptor Vincenzo Ragusa (1841-1927), an oyatoi gaijin, one of the foreign 'experts' invited by the Japanese government to advise on various western skills. Carving in wood and ivory was taught, as well as casting in bronze.
Udagawa Kazuo seems to be unrecorded except for his authorship of this fine bronze, examples of which were exhibited in the St. Louis in 1904 and in the Japan-British Exhibition in London in 1910.
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