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Dish
Unknown - Enlarge image
Dish
- Place of origin:
Japan (made)
Arita, Japan (made) - Date:
1700-1725 (made)
- Artist/Maker:
Unknown (production)
- Materials and Techniques:
Porcelain decorated in underglaze blue, overglaze enamels and gilt
- Credit Line:
Salting Bequest
- Museum number:
C.1513-1910
- Gallery location:
Japan, room 45, case 1
This large dish showing a woman and her two attendants is a fine example of the type of porcelain made in early 18th-century Japan for export to Europe. On its base there appears a Dresden inventory mark, indicating that the piece came from the collection of the Elector Frederick Augustus I of Saxony, ‘Augustus the Strong’, who died in 1733. The areas of dark blue were achieved by painting with cobalt oxide under a clear glaze and firing to a high temperature in a reducing atmosphere - one in which the kiln is starved of oxygen so that the burning fuel draws chemically bonded oxygen from the reactive parts of the ceramic material, leaving them in a reduced state and changing their colour. The gold, red and other enamel colours were applied and fused on in subsequent, low-temperature firings. The distinctive so-called Imari-style colour scheme was much copied by 18th-century European manufacturers. The term Imari comes from the name of the port in western Japan through which this and other products of the nearby Arita kilns were shipped. Porcelains for export were sent to Nagasaki and then shipped abroad by Chinese and Dutch merchants, the Dutch, who were based on the island of Dejima, being the only Europeans permitted to conduct trade in Japan at this time.
