Boat-Shaped Bowl with Plovers
Seifū Yohei III (Japanese, 1851–1914)
1893–97
- Medium
- Stoneware with crackled glaze and overglaze color enamel and gold
- Classification
- Ceramic
- Dimensions
- height: 5 cm (1 15/16 in.); length: 17 cm (6 11/16 in.); depth: 8.5 cm (3 3/8 in.)
- Culture
- Japan, Meiji period (1868–1912)
- Museum
- Cleveland Museum of Art, Japanese Art
- Credit line
- Gift of James and Christine Heusinger
- Rights
- Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Little Ones profiles and older: it shows gentle subjects for the very young. How works are placed
View at the Cleveland Museum of Art
About this work
Overglaze color enamels create a seascape made complete by the bowl’s boat shape. The bowl’s form inserts a human presence into the scene, much in the way rusu mōyō is used in paintings to suggest people just out of view. Rusu mōyō is a pictorial device by which the presence of someone physically absent from an image is conveyed through the depiction of clothing or other items.
The inside of the bowl has a scene of plovers flying through the sky over a profusion of seaweed in sand below. In addition to the black, gray, and green of the overglaze elements, warm pink banding and mottling in the clay come through the glaze and are remarkably effective at suggesting the seashore.
