Bowl with Chinese Landscape (1893–1914): Art, History and Details

Bowl with Chinese Landscape (1893–1914) 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:

This bowl has a landscape with figures in blue and iron oxide. The scene is set along a river with mountains in the distance, likely in the Jiangnan region of southern China, famous for compositions of the Eight Views of the Xiao and Xiang Rivers and of West Lake in Hangzhou. There are two people in the foreground: one person fishes along the riverbank across from a rustic hermit’s lodge sited on stilts over the water’s edge; on the other side of the bowl, a person with a tall staff gazes at the full moon, accompanied by his servant. The foot has a double band in blue, while another blue band encircles the bowl just beneath the rim, which is covered in red iron oxide. The inside of the footring is also circled in blue around the impressed mark.

Object facts

• Title: Bowl with Chinese Landscape
• Date: 1893–1914
• Creator attribution: Seifū Yohei III (Japanese, 1851–1914)
• Culture: Japan, Meiji period (1868–1912)
• Type: Ceramic
• Technique: porcelain with underglaze blue and overglaze red
• Dimensions: height: 8 cm (3 1/8 in.); Diameter: 21 cm (8 1/4 in.)
• Collection: Japanese Art
• Department: Japanese Art
• Accession number: 2022.153

A detail from the museum

The flock of geese making its way across the sky and the many bare tree branches suggest the season may be autumn.

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.