Cobalt and Copper Red: A 1942 Bowl by Kawai Kanjirō

Bowl with Grass and Flower Design, Cobalt Blue and Copper Red Glaze

Three large floral motifs in pink-red turn around the centre of this bowl, each outlined in white and touched with blue-grey. A smaller one sits in the middle. Yellow-brown arcs follow the rim, and the ground is a speckled grey-green.

The bowl is by Kawai Kanjirō (河井寬次郎, 1890 to 1966) and dated 1942. It is very probably the bowl in the National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto (京都国立近代美術館), titled 呉洲辰砂草花図鉢 (Gosu shinsha sōka-zu bachi), "Bowl with Grass and Flower Design, Cobalt Blue and Copper Red Glaze", number Cr0472. The museum's only photograph is taken from an angle, so the match cannot be certain. Another bowl in the same museum has the same title and year, but its dark brown centre does not fit this image.

The Glazes

The title names the two colours. Gosu (呉洲) is cobalt, which gives the blue. Shinsha (辰砂) is copper red, which gives the pink-red of the flowers. The bowl is stoneware and measures 34.5 cm across and 8.5 cm high, so it is a large piece, a bowl (鉢) rather than a dish.

The Collection

The museum's bowl is part of its Kawakatsu Collection (川勝コレクション) of Kawai's work and was a gift in the 1968 financial year. It has been lent to many exhibitions since 1970.

Kawai was a co-founder of the Mingei (folk craft) movement with Yanagi Sōetsu (柳宗悦) and Hamada Shōji (濱田庄司).

Elsewhere on the blog, Kawai's work appears on an exhibition flyer for a flattened vase, in a black-and-white photograph of a tea bowl that leaves its colours unknown, and on a late plate with swirling glaze that we have not traced to a museum record.

Kawai painted this bowl in cobalt and copper red. In our monochrome range on Etsy, the only colours are those the clay and kiln give: the pieces we bring there are matte black or wood-fired, in forms that are a little uneven.