Sake Bottle (mid- to late 1600s): Art, History and Details

Sake Bottle (mid- to late 1600s) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

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

When the late 16th-century shogun (military ruler) of Japan, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, invaded Korea in 1593, and then again in 1597, he made several momentous discoveries which were to change the course of Japanese cultural history. Hideyoshi's troops reported the existence of a sophisticated ceramic industry using large, multichambered kilns to produce high-fired porcelain wares. Since this technology did not exist in Japan, Hideyoshi ordered the resettlement of skilled potters in Japan. Not long thereafter this new kiln technology transformed tea taste and ceramic art in Japan. Subsequently, Korean potters uncovered for the first time in Japan the kaolin deposits fundamental to high-fired porcelain production. So beginning in the mid-1600s, the earliest white Japanese porcelains appeared, produced by Korean potters who transmitted traditional Korean ceramic shapes and surface decoration to their fellow Japanese workers. This small sake flask is a second generation example of that heritage and illustrates a fundamental cultural linkage between Korean and Japanese art.

Object facts

• Title: Sake Bottle
• Date: mid- to late 1600s
• Culture: Japan, Edo period (1615–1868)
• Type: Ceramic
• Technique: porcelain with underglaze blue (Hizen ware, Arita type, Imari style)
• Dimensions: Diameter: 10.2 cm (4 in.); Overall: 20 cm (7 7/8 in.)
• Collection: Japanese Art
• Department: Japanese Art
• Accession number: 1992.117

A detail from the museum

Sake may be served heated or chilled, and, as with wine, the recommended serving temperature of sake varies greatly by type.

Collection credit

The Severance and Greta Millikin Purchase Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Turner, Evan H. "The Year in Review for 1992." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 80, no. 2 (1993): 38-79.

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.