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Jug
Hamada, Shoji, born 1894 - died 1978 - Enlarge image
Jug
- Place of origin:
Mashiko, Japan (made)
- Date:
ca. 1935 (made)
- Artist/Maker:
Hamada, Shoji, born 1894 - died 1978 (maker)
- Materials and Techniques:
Stoneware with brown tenmoku glaze
- Credit Line:
Given by the Contemporary Art Society through Ernest Marsh
- Museum number:
C.209-1939
- Gallery location:
Studio Ceramics, room 142, case 8, shelf 4
Hamada Shoji (1894-1978) was one of the leading potters of the Japanese Mingei (Folk Craft) movement. He was closely associated both with Yanagi Soetsu (1889-1961), the philosopher-critic on whose theories the movement was founded, and the pioneer English studio potter Bernard Leach (1887-1979), whom he helped establish the Leach Pottery in St Ives, Cornwall, during the early 1920s.
The Mingei movement developed in early twentieth-century Japan as a social and aesthetic crusade. It held ideas in common with the English Arts and Crafts theorists John Ruskin and William Morris about the value of hand-work and the negative effects of industrialisation and mass production. It actively sought to save and revive Japanese folk-craft traditions, which were becoming sidelined due to the forces of modernisation and urbanisation, and was part of a broader cultural movement in which Japan sought to articulate and assert a sense of national identity in the face of burgeoning westernisation.
