Unknown
Japanese
Plate with Design of a Willow Tree, 1603-1868 Edo period
Seto stoneware with underglaze iron and cobalt
SBMA, Gift of Harry Packard
1965.47
RESEARCH PAPER
General Information
The development of Japanese ceramics coincides generally with four great waves of foreign influence. First, the Tang (618-907) and Sung (960-1126) brought celadons and three-color pottery. Second, from Korea in the 16th century, came crude porcelain, white and underglaze blue. Korean immigrants built improved kilns on the island of Kyushu where they discovered untapped sources for porcelain clay. Third, by the middle of the 17th century, Chinese overglaze decoration techniques, originating during the Ming Dynasty (1368-1643), were spread by Korean potters on Kyushu to potteries all over Japan by the 18th century. Fourth, the demand for export Chinas, sparked by Portuguese traders in the 17th century grew to global proportions by the 19th century.
Although Japanese potters used Chinese prototypes faithfully, there were striking differences in the conditions of manufacture. Chinese ceramic designs were executed by master craftsmen, often dozens working on one piece, each executing a specialized part of the design, over and over. Japanese designs were more apt to be the work of one potter. In China, hundreds of workers were employed at one time at enormous government owned kilns, which turned out thousands of pieces. The designs were strictly controlled, furnished and sanctioned by the imperial court. So strict was the oversight that coloring materials were carefully measured out along with quotas established for each worker. Kilns, which operated only on order from the court, shut down when each order was completed. In Japan, the influence of the court was indirect at best. Potters worked as individuals, designing, making, and decorating each object, usually under the protection and patronage of local daimyo. Potters often had home workshops and were assisted by family members, or a few student apprentices. Their output was often fired in a community kiln. Almost every feudal lord operated a kiln at which wares were made for his personal use. Instead of fixed production quotas, output was often specialized and limited. Under this feudal system, the workers received a stipend whether they worked or not. Pottery making potential became even more artful and individualistic under the influence of the famous tea masters. The Japanese peasant potter could achieve high status as a master craftsman with the rewards of patronage and recognition. In contrast, his Chinese counterpart was more apt to be an anonymous worker in a bureaucratic factory system.
Background
By the middle of the 19th century, the later part of the Edo, into the Meiji period (1868-1912), there were over 2,000 active kilns with 184 established as official kilns to various daimyo. They produced a variety of wares, ranging from tea ceremony vessels, fine quality porcelains for use of the elite to everyday wares sold in the marketplace. Throughout the periods of ceramic development, folk pottery manufacture remained vibrant and strong. Pottery for ritual use, i.e. in burials, had been produced since prehistoric times, but from roughly the 12th to the 16th century, large, simple, utilitarian ceramic wares were made at regional kilns largely for use in farm communities. The active ceramic producing areas were known as The Six Old Kilns.
Seto Ware Plate Description
The most commercially successful of the six medieval stoneware kilns were those in the area of Seto, in present day Aichi prefecture, 20 kilometers NE of the city of Nagoya. Seto potters were famous for their tea ceremony pottery during the Momoyama period (1568-1615), but by the Edo period, they had largely reverted to the production of everyday wares. Among the most well known were ezara, pictorial plates of three types: aburazara, or oil plates for catching oil under lamps, ishizara, and umanomezara which were two types of so called stone plates. SBMA’s plate is an ishizara or herring plate. This type was used to serve the ubiquitous meal of fish and vegetables cooked in soy to travelers at wayside booths or village inns. According to Seto pottery lore, the ishizara ware was produced in Seto village itself. Made in large quantities, they were sold cheaply and distributed widely. Placed in stacks within huge climbing kilns of up to twenty chambers, which held up to, 1,400 pieces, the plates took nearly ten days to fire. These serving dishes, with sloping sides and broad horizontal rims, averaged 32 centimeters in diameter and were decorated with a great variety of motifs: plant forms, birds, flowers, landscapes, land and sea creatures, auspicious symbols and even poems. Painted loosely and quickly with a brush, the designs were applied as an underglaze with iron or cobalt from local sources. After decoration, the plates were covered with a transparent glaze made of wood ash and local feldspar. An old Set potter told the folk art scholar, Yanagi Soetsu, that a typical potter could decorate 200 plates in a day.
Soetsu, leader and spokesperson for the Japanese Folk Art Movement, or Mingei enthusiastically describes their “discovery” in the feature article of the inaugural edition of Kogei, the craft magazine that was the official voice of the movement. “I can’t think of anything that has had so meteoric an impact on the art world as the discovery of this variety of plate. Once the word got out, they began to spring up in collections like bamboo shoots. . . Ceramic decoration at this level of beauty rarely appears elsewhere in Japan, and even among the vast production at Seto, its existence must be written in very large letters (1931)”.
The characteristic, which belied their mass production, was variety in the spontaneity and whimsy of the decorative motifs. SBMA’s plate illustrates a simple plant motif in cobalt and iron, which almost encircles the inner circumference below the rim. The strokes are quick and sure, creating a pleasing, free hand design. Totally unique in its way, the composition represents a moment, frozen in time, of folk artistry.
SBMA’s Plate came as a gift from oriental art dealer, Harry Packard, from whom the Museum purchased two paintings in the late 1960’s and is a fitting companion to the Tamba Jars acquired around the same time from Wright Ludington.
Bibliography
Graham, Hazel H., Japanese and Oriental Ceramics, (Charles Tuttle) 1971
Jenyns, Soame, Japanese Pottery, (Praeger Publications) 1971
Munsterberg, Hugo, The Folk Arts of Japan, (Charles Tuttle) 1958
Rhodes, Daniel, Tamba Pottery the Timeless Art of a Japanese Village, (Kodansha International)
Wilson, Richard L., “Ezara: Pictorial Plates from Seto”, Orientations, vol.25, no.9, Sept. 1994
Graham, Patricia J., “Japanese Popular Ceramics in the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art," Orientations, vol. 25, no. 9, Sept. 1994
Prepared for SBMA Docent Council Asian team 1995, revised 2003 by Gay Collins
SBMA CURATORIAL LABELS
Large serving dishes, like the one shown here, were important commercial products of the Seto kilns, Japan’s largest ceramics-production center, located in present-day Aichi Prefecture east of Nagoya city.
- SBMA Gallery Label, 2012