Pheasants in Cherry
Seifū Yohei III (Japanese, 1851–1914)
1900–1914
- Medium
- Porcelain with molded and carved design, underglaze color, and cream glaze
- Classification
- Ceramic
- Dimensions
- height: 39 cm (15 3/8 in.); Diameter: 28.5 cm (11 1/4 in.)
- Culture
- Japan, Meiji period (1868–1912)
- Museum
- Cleveland Museum of Art, Japanese Art
- Credit line
- Dudley P. Allen Fund
- 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
Like the design of Flower Vase with Phoenix in Paulownia (CMA 2022.199), the pair of pheasants in a dramatic landscape setting on this vase was created by adding clay to the surface of the clay body and then molding and carving it. Here, instead of a typical white clay, Yohei III has used an ivory clay. He then added gradated pink around the complex design, which with its multitude of cherry blossoms must have been painstaking to mask with precision. For the birds’ eyes, he added a touch of yellow. He then fired the vase with an allover translucent cream glaze. The resulting kanpakuji piece is one in which an academic subject long favored by painters of the Kano school for screen and sliding door paintings in important buildings, that of impressively sized birds within a scene of precipitous, angled rock faces and twisting trees, is made soft and ethereal while retaining a sense of gravitas.
