Incense Burner (1895–1914): Art, History and Details

Incense Burner (1895–1914) 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:

Kyoto-based Japanese ceramist Seifū Yohei III (1851–1914) admired the glaze colors found on Chinese porcelain and tried to replicate them through intensive experimentation. His green and creamy white glazes were particularly well received. The combinations of colors with subtle molded and incised decorations in his ceramics respond powerfully to changes in light, creating a dynamic viewing experience. Names for the glazes, written in ink with a brush on the lids of the custom-made storage boxes for the works, often indicate a specific glaze or ware that had inspired him, even when the resulting color was distinctively his own.

Object facts

• Title: Incense Burner
• Date: 1895–1914
• Creator attribution: Seifū Yohei III (Japanese, 1851–1914)
• Culture: Japan, Meiji period (1868–1912)
• Type: Ceramic
• Technique: Porcelain with tea-leaf colored glaze and molded design and geometric openwork silver lid
• Dimensions: height with lid: 14 cm (5 1/2 in.); Diameter: 14.4 cm (5 11/16 in.)
• Collection: Japanese Art
• Department: Japanese Art
• Accession number: 2022.177

A detail from the museum

This incense burner with a geometric-patterned silver lid has a glaze identified on its box lid as “tea leaf [color–glazed] porcelain” (chayōji).

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.
• "Colours of Kyoto, Ceramics From the Yohei Studio." The Asian Art Newspaper: Monthly for Collectors, Dealers, Museums and Galleries 27, no. 1 (November 2023): 8

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.