Sold Ceramics - Sold Japanese Early Overglaze Enamelled wares 1660-1680 - Page 1

Object 2012446

Dish

Japan

1660-1680

Height 37 mm (1.46 inch), diameter of rim 143 mm (5.63 inch), diameter of footring 75 mm (5.95 inch), weight 157 grams (5.54 ounce (oz.))

Dish on footring, flat rim. Decorated in early enamels in a Chinese kraak style, the outlines and details in black. The central eight-pointed star-shaped medallion painted with a thick blue enamel band is decorated with a bird perched on a rock gazing at clouds among flowering plants and grasses. The gently rounded with eight onion-shaped medallions alternately painted with stylized peach sprays and auspicious objects, each connected by a single looped C-scroll below the rim. The reverse is similarly decorated in blue enamel with seven segments each with a group of three dots, framed within a thin iron iron-red line round the rim and two on the footring.

Although the Chinese had produced some enamelled transitional porcelain for the Dutch at the end of the Ming Dynasty, the public in the West largely associated Chinese porcelain with underglaze blue wares and was not aware of the polychrome types. The Japanese pieces, coloured with dark red, yellow, green, brown even gold and silver must have come as a great surprise to those who were sensitive to new and exotic things. A fashion was created, and right from the beginning enamelled wares formed a substantial part of all the Dutch East India Company (VOC) porcelain shipments from Japan.

Of course, there were also customers in Batavia and Holland who were more old-fashioned and preferred the traditional underglaze blue porcelains that they were used to. And there were others who demanded tableware in Western forms, a category that had been highly successful in Chinese transitional porcelain. Japanese potters, realizing the importance of the Dutch to their expanding industry, were eager to please all of these groups. Thus in the decades after 1660 the Artita kilns responded to Dutch demand for porcelains in three categories: enamelled wares, largely decorated in Japanese style; underglaze blue wares in an imitation of Chinese kraak and transitional porcelain; and commande porcelain copying Western shapes such as spittoons, mugs and ewers, Naturally, these categories overlapped. For instance there were dishes with kraak patterns done in overglaze enamels, which were destined not for the Netherlands but for the inter-Asian porcelain trade of the Dutch East India Company. And there were new forms like the kendi, modelled on a traditional South Asian water vessel, which was ordered for markets in Southeast Asia and was not part of the shipments to Holland. (Impey, Jörg & Mason 2009, pp.47-48)

The design is a close adaption of a piece of Chinese kraak porcelain but details such as the sketchily painted flowers and symbols betray its Japanese origin. Above all, it is the enamelling which is such an inventive Japanese addition to the kraak style. All known Chinese kraak pieces are in underglaze blue, very few have added touches of enamel for detail, and only one piece - In the Princessehof Museum in Leeuwarden is in enamels only. Although it is assumed that the Chinese did not produce on a large scale for export after 1645-50, some porcelain was still made in the years thereafter. The Leeuwarden dish may have been an isolated attempt to copy the successful Japanese pieces.

2012446 1 2010645 1

A comparisson between object 2012446 and a similarly shaped, sized and decorated Chinese kraak dish, object 2010645. (Object 2010645 is not included in this sale/offer.)

For identically shaped, sized an similarly decorated dishes, please see:

For an identically shaped, sized and in underglaze blue decorated, please see:

Complete Catalogue of the Shibata Collection, (The Kyushu Ceramic Museum, Kyushu 2003), p.172, cat. 1320.

Condition: A firing flaw with on each side a connected firing tension hairline and a fleabite to the rim.

Reference:

Daendels 1981, cat. 8c

Oxford 1981, cat. 153

Impey 2002, cat. 58

Jörg 2003/1, pp.49-51, cat. 34

Kyushu 2003, cat. 1097 & 1320

Impey, Jörg & Mason 2009, pp.47-48

Price: Sold.