Maple Leaf-Shaped Saucers (1893–1914): Art, History and Details

Maple Leaf-Shaped Saucers (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:

These maple leaf–shaped saucers, like Yohei III's 5 shell saucers CMA 2022.188, have a long, horizontal box with a separate compartment for each piece. Now a set of 5, these dishes were originally a set of 10, stored in two boxes of 5 each. From their housings, which accommodate differing numbers of objects, one can hypothesize that while some items created by the Seifu studio were intended to be acquired in larger sets, and thus were perhaps made to order, others, like these, may have been items to be purchased off the shelf in set quantities that allowed clients flexibility in scale. The box for thesev5 saucers describes them as “heavenly blue[–glazed] porcelain” (tenseiji). The veins of the leaves are slightly raised in the clay so that the glaze pools around them and they stand out as white where the glaze thins. There are longer lines at the points of the leaves and shorter ones following the wall of each indentation so that the design has both a horizontal and a subtle vertical dimension. Each saucer has a round foot.

Object facts

• Title: Maple Leaf-Shaped Saucers
• Date: 1893–1914
• Creator attribution: Seifū Yohei III (Japanese, 1851–1914)
• Culture: Japan, Meiji period (1868–1912)
• Type: Ceramic
• Technique: Set of five saucers; porcelain with molded design and blue glaze
• Dimensions: height (each): 2.5 cm (1 in.); width (each): 9 cm (3 9/16 in.)
• Collection: Japanese Art
• Department: Japanese Art
• Accession number: 2022.191

A detail from the museum

These saucers shaped like maple leaves show Seifū Yohei III’s “heavenly blue 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.