Box with Butterfly
Seifū Yohei I (Japanese, 1801–1861)
1855–57
- Medium
- Porcelain with underglaze blue
- Classification
- Ceramic
- Dimensions
- height: 10 cm (3 15/16 in.); length: 11 cm (4 5/16 in.); width: 11 cm (4 5/16 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
This sturdy box, with comparatively thick walls and resulting heft, is sparsely decorated with a single butterfly motif in dark underglaze blue cobalt in one corner of the lid and with repeating floral patterns along the lid and base. Single broken lines of underglaze blue define the edge of the box lid’s top where it curves to meet the sides and again where it meets the base of the box. Another blue band runs around the upper rim of the base where it meets the lip, left unglazed for a better grip of the lid when the box is closed. Yohei I’s signature on the center of the recessed base is set within a wide blue square.
The porcelain box is meant to call to mind a famous story attributed to Zhuang Zhou (c. 369–286 BCE), also known as Master Zhuang, or Zhuangzi, pronounced Soji in Japanese. The second chapter of Zhuangzi, his eponymous collection of anecdotes, records the story as follows:
Once, Zhuang Zhou dreamt he was a butterfly, a butterfly flitting and fluttering about, happy with himself and doing as he pleased. He didn’t know that he was Zhuang Zhou. Suddenly, he woke up and there he was, solid and unmistakable Zhuang Zhou. But he didn’t know if he was Zhuang Zhou who had…
