Dish from Snow-Flake Side Dishes (1893–1914): Art, History and Details

Dish from Snow-Flake Side Dishes (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:

According to the box lid, this set of 6 side dishes, or mukōzuke, are “snow-flower style” (sekkashiki), having mouths shaped like snowflakes. Their mouths, which have 6 lobes and scalloped edges, are traced with brown iron oxide at the rim. The outside of each bowl is glazed with a very bright pink over the basin and foot, and the inside is left white. From directly above, one sees a snowflake-like shape, and from the side, they seem to float above a rosy ground.

Object facts

• Title: Dish from Snow-Flake Side Dishes
• Date: 1893–1914
• Creator attribution: Seifū Yohei III (Japanese, 1851–1914)
• Culture: Japan, Meiji period (1868–1912)
• Type: Ceramic
• Technique: One from a set of six porcelain dishes; porcelain with lobed rims and pink glaze
• Dimensions: Overall: 5 x 13.5 cm (1 15/16 x 5 5/16 in.)
• Collection: Japanese Art
• Department: Japanese Art
• Accession number: 2022.194.2

A detail from the museum

The box for this set of dishes has an inscription on the side noting that they were for a person with the family name Nakamoto.

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.