Medicine Bottle (1670s): Art, History and Details

Medicine Bottle (1670s) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

While inspired by medicine jars used in European pharmacies, this bottle was likely decorative. It may have been exported by the Dutch East India Company, a powerful trading company from the Netherlands. In Japan, it operated from Deshima, a man-made island in Nagasaki harbor created in 1636. The initials “I. C.” appear on the base. As the letter J was often transposed with the letter I in Europe of the 1600s, some scholars believe the bottle may have been made for Johannes Camphuys (1634–1695), who was in charge of the Dutch East India Company’s operations in Deshima in 1671.

Object facts

• Title: Medicine Bottle
• Date: 1670s
• Culture: Japan, Edo period (1615–1868)
• Type: Ceramic
• Technique: porcelain with underglaze blue decoration
• Dimensions: height: 41.3 cm (16 1/4 in.)
• Collection: Japanese Art
• Department: Japanese Art
• Accession number: 1966.514

Collection credit

Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Severance A. Millikin

Further reading listed by the museum

• Lerner, Martin. “Tea-Ceremony Pottery and Export Porcelain.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 54, no. 9 (November 1967): 267–278, 290–292B.
• Lerner, Martin. Blue and White: Early Japanese Export Ware. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1978.

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.