Flower Vase with Floral Scroll (1893–1914): Art, History and Details

Flower Vase with Floral Scroll (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:

The upper part of this vase is painted in underglaze blue with a floral scroll of leaves accentuated with a single chrysanthemum motif on each face and bound at top and bottom with single blue lines. The box lid for the vase is short on detail; the inscription notes only that it is a flower vase with underglaze blue. It is possible that the box is a mismatch because the inscription does not mention the vase’s more distinctive feature: the deep green glaze on its lower half, which is seen much less frequently among Yohei III’s works. This glaze may be an example of a dark green porcelain glaze called rōkanji, which the artist invented in 1892. The name of the glaze comes from Chinese, in which it is pronounced langgan. It may literally mean “tinkling sound of jade” and could refer to malachite, among other proposed identifications.

Object facts

• Title: Flower Vase with Floral Scroll
• Date: 1893–1914
• Creator attribution: Seifū Yohei III (Japanese, 1851–1914)
• Culture: Japan, Meiji period (1868–1912)
• Type: Ceramic
• Technique: Porcelain with underglaze colors and green glaze
• Dimensions: 24.5 x 12 cm (9 5/8 x 4 3/4 in.)
• Collection: Japanese Art
• Department: Japanese Art
• Accession number: 2022.192

A detail from the museum

The center of each chrysanthemum has a crescent-shaped design at the top filled with a very pale yellow wash under the transparent glaze.

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.