Boat-Shaped Bowl with Plovers (1893–97): Art, History and Details

Boat-Shaped Bowl with Plovers (1893–97) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Seifū Yohei III (Japanese, 1851–1914).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the 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.

Object facts

• Title: Boat-Shaped Bowl with Plovers
• Date: 1893–97
• Creator attribution: Seifū Yohei III (Japanese, 1851–1914)
• Culture: Japan, Meiji period (1868–1912)
• Type: Ceramic
• Technique: Stoneware with crackled glaze and overglaze color enamel and gold
• Dimensions: height: 5 cm (1 15/16 in.); length: 17 cm (6 11/16 in.); depth: 8.5 cm (3 3/8 in.)
• Collection: Japanese Art
• Department: Japanese Art
• Accession number: 2022.183

A detail from the museum

On the outside of the bowl, on each side, birds fly about grasses in search of a meal.

Collection credit

Gift of James and Christine Heusinger

Further reading listed by the museum

• Maezaki, Shinya and Sinéad Vilbar. Colors of Kyoto: The Seifū Yohei Ceramic Studio. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 2023.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.