Square Bottle with Squirrel and Grapes (late 1600s): Art, History and Details

Square Bottle with Squirrel and Grapes (late 1600s) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

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

In the 1600s, Korean and Japanese elites could enjoy wine from Europe. In his 1636 travel diary called Haecharok, Kim Seryeom, a vice director of Korean envoys to Japan, recorded that the head of Japan’s Tsusima Island treated him to Western red wine. Therefore, export porcelain ware like Square Bottle with Squirrel and Grapes could have been made as a wine bottle.

Object facts

• Title: Square Bottle with Squirrel and Grapes
• Date: late 1600s
• Culture: Japan, Edo period (1615–1868)
• Type: Ceramic
• Technique: porcelain with overglaze color enamel (possibly Hizen ware, Kakiemon type)
• Dimensions: Overall: 21.8 x 8.3 cm (8 9/16 x 3 1/4 in.)
• Collection: Japanese Art
• Department: Japanese Art
• Accession number: 1964.261

Collection credit

Severance and Greta Millikin Collection

Further reading listed by the museum

• Cleveland Museum of Art, and Jenifer Neils. The World of Ceramics: Masterpieces from the Cleveland Museum of Art. Cleveland: Museum in cooperation with Indiana University Press, 1982.
• Cleveland Museum of Art, and Sŏn Sŭng-hye. The Lure of Painted Poetry: Japanese and Korean Art. Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art, 2011.

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.