Ming Porcelain and Japanese Kiriko Glass at a Museum Breakfast Table
For its 2009 exhibition 「染付－藍が彩るアジアの器」 (14 July to 6 September 2009), Tokyo National Museum laid a breakfast table. It sits alongside the museum's tea setting and sake service from the same show. The museum's note describes it as "the image of a refreshing summer breakfast table, with a small glass dish as an accent".
The arrangement sets a Ming Chinese blue-and-white bowl beside 19th-century Japanese indigo cut glass, known as kiriko. It is a modern museum display, not a recreation of a historical Japanese table.
The table belonged to the exhibition's final section, which set out table settings meant to take a fresh look at the meal table (膳) through sometsuke. The museum's text there regrets that we are forgetting the pleasure of choosing between ceramics, lacquer, glass and metal to suit the season and the room. This small table puts porcelain and glass side by side. Below, we look at the two identified pieces.
Ming Chinese Blue-and-White Bowl with Tortoise-Shell Pattern
The museum gives no English title for this bowl, which we render as Bowl with Tortoise-shell Pattern in Underglaze Blue. It was made in China during the Ming dynasty, in the 15th to 16th century. No kiln is recorded. For another Ming piece from the same exhibition, see a Ming tea caddy from Jingdezhen.
The bowl is porcelain, decorated in underglaze blue with a tortoise-shell pattern (亀甲, kikkō), as its title describes.
Seika (青花; qinghua in Chinese) is the Chinese term for what Japanese calls sometsuke (染付). It means porcelain with a white body painted with a cobalt-oxide pigment and fired under a clear, glassy glaze, so the design shows as blue on white. The museum's exhibition text explains that the technique was perfected in China, at the Jingdezhen kilns, towards the end of the Yuan dynasty, and later spread to Vietnam, Korea and Japan. In the Ming dynasty, blue-and-white was also taken up by the official kilns that made wares for the imperial court, and a refined, dignified style emerged. The record for this bowl says only that it was made in China, so it doesn't tell us which kind of kiln produced it.
It stands 6.4 cm high, with a mouth of 13.6 cm and a foot of 4.6 cm.
Japanese Kiriko Cut Glass: Two Indigo Footed Dishes
The glass on the table comes from a set the museum catalogues as Cut-Glass ("Kiriko") Bowls. The set is Japanese, made in the 19th century, between the Edo period and the Meiji era. The record says it was probably made in Satsuma and Edo.
The set has eight pieces: five copper-red cased dishes, two indigo footed dishes and one white footed dish. They were passed down together. The museum record notes that although they are small, they show highly skilled cutting, such as the fine 魚子 (nanako) cuts on the bottoms of the red dishes. The breakfast table uses the two indigo footed dishes.
Kiriko (切子) simply means cut glass. Satsuma and Edo, the two places the record names, were Japan's best-known centres for it in the 19th century.
In Edo, cut glass is traced to 1834, when Kagaya Kyūbei (加賀屋久兵衛), an Edo glass merchant, carved the surface of glass using emery. Edo-period Edo kiriko was cut mainly in clear, colourless glass. Its traditional patterns include nanako, named because the glittering cuts resemble a string of fish roe.
In Satsuma (present-day Kagoshima), glassmaking began in 1846, when the domain lord Shimazu Narioki brought in the Edo glassworker Shimoto Kamejirō to make glass for medicine production. Under his successor, Shimazu Nariakira, the domain worked out how to make red glass coloured with copper, and also made blue, purple and other coloured glass. Satsuma pieces were often made by casing clear glass in a layer of colour and cutting through it from the surface. The works were short-lived: Nariakira died suddenly, and the factory was damaged in the Anglo-Satsuma War of 1863.
The museum record does not say which pieces in this set came from Satsuma and which from Edo.
Ming Porcelain and Kiriko Cut Glass at Breakfast
The two pieces on this table differ in country, material and age. The bowl is Chinese porcelain from the 15th to 16th century. The dishes are Japanese cut glass from the 19th century.
What they share is blue: underglaze blue on the porcelain and indigo in the glass. The museum's 2009 display places them side by side, with the glass as the accent the note describes.
The Ming bowl and the kiriko glass stay with the museum. If you'd like a quieter look at your own breakfast table, browse the plain, wabi-sabi pieces we provide in our Etsy shop.
Comments