Sake Cup with Auspicious Plants (1861–78): Art, History and Details

Sake Cup with Auspicious Plants (1861–78) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Seifū Yohei II (Japanese, 1844–1878).

The work and its context

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

Seifū Yohei II excelled as a painter, as evidenced by his floral and landscape designs. His works were selected as the best among Kyoto ceramics shown to jurists from Europe and the US, thus paving the way for international recognition of the studio in the late 1800s.

Object facts

• Title: Sake Cup with Auspicious Plants
• Date: 1861–78
• Creator attribution: Seifū Yohei II (Japanese, 1844–1878)
• Culture: Japan
• Type: Ceramic
• Technique: One of a pair of sake cups; porcelain with underglaze blue
• Collection: Japanese Art
• Department: Japanese Art
• Accession number: 2022.145.2

A detail from the museum

The plum and the pine are two of the "Three Friends of Winter," auspicious symbols of a cultured scholar's virtues: steadfastness, resilience, and flexibility.

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.