Long-Necked Vase (1893–97): Art, History and Details

Long-Necked Vase (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:

The glazing of this long, narrow-necked and bulbous-based vase has a network of shallow cracks, created when the glaze fractured as it cooled from firing. It is called a cracked-ice pattern or glaze, since the effect resembles the surface of a frozen lake. The cracks here are of a consistently high density throughout the vessel. This pattern is observed also in the transparent glaze of some Kyoto ware, in some of Yohei III’s green glazes, and in some of his vessels emulating Chinese forms. The interior of the box lid has an attestation to its authenticity by Yohei IV, and the footring is inscribed Seifū of Great Japan (Dai Nihon Seifū) in iron black.

Object facts

• Title: Long-Necked Vase
• Date: 1893–97
• Creator attribution: Seifū Yohei III (Japanese, 1851–1914)
• Culture: Japan, Meiji period (1868–1912)
• Type: Ceramic
• Technique: Stoneware with crackled glaze
• Dimensions: height: 30 cm (11 13/16 in.); Diameter: 15.5 cm (6 1/8 in.)
• Collection: Japanese Art
• Department: Japanese Art
• Accession number: 2022.196

A detail from the museum

Seifū Yohei III apprenticed in the Seifū studio, married into the family, and later adopted the Seifū Yohei name, when he became head of the studio.

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.