With its exploitation of chance effects, rough textures, controlled irregularity and emphatic celebration of the potter's touch, this jar is characteristic of a strand in Japanese ceramics particularly associated with the tea ceremony, for use in which it was intended.

The jar was acquired, like many of the V&A's best tea ceramics, from the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition of 1876. The previous year the South Kensington Museum (now the V&A) had paid £1,000 to the Exposition's Japanese commissioners to make a selection of ceramics 'to give fully the history of the art.' At nine shillings (45p), this jar was relatively inexpensive, reflecting the low value attached to historical tea wares at a time of extreme adulation of the West. The importance of such pieces in the Japanese ceramic canon has long since been recognised, however, and this jar now ranks as one of the cornerstones of the V&A's Japanese collection.

The jar was made in Bizen, one of the first areas to make purpose-made tea wares in the late sixteenth century. Prior to that, ceramics from China, Korea and South-East Asia had been prized, as had some native Japanese ceramics. The latter included earlier Bizen and Shigaraki wares originally made for alternative purposes but adopted by tea afici0nados for tea ceremony use. This jar would have been used to contain cold water, which was used to top up water heated in a cast-iron kettle. Powerfully sculpted, it embodies both the taste for the simple and restrained characteristic of the 'wabi' tea aesthetic championed by the tea master Sen no Rikyu (1522-1591) and the taste for the bold and exuberant characteristic of Furuta Oribe (1544-1615), a follower of Rikyu who succeeded his teacher as leading tea master of the day and was particularly active in commissioning tea wares from different Japanese kilns.