Sweets Bowl with Plum Tree (1914–46): Art, History and Details

Sweets Bowl with Plum Tree (1914–46) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Seifū Yohei IV (Japanese, 1872–1951).

The work and its context

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

In Chinese culture, the plum symbolizes the virtue of perseverance. For his sweets bowl based on Qing dynasty (1644–1911) Chinese prototypes, Seifū Yohei IV first painted the gnarled boughs of a plum tree in iron oxide on the surface. Then he made the tree’s blossoms slightly raised by building up slip, or liquified clay. He painted their centers yellow. Before applying the blue glaze, he covered the blossoms with paper so that they remained white.

Object facts

• Title: Sweets Bowl with Plum Tree
• Date: 1914–46
• Creator attribution: Seifū Yohei IV (Japanese, 1872–1951)
• Culture: Japan, Taishō period (1912–26) to Shōwa period (1926–89)
• Type: Ceramic
• Technique: Porcelain with underglaze color and modeled design
• Dimensions: 11.5 x 21.5 cm (4 1/2 x 8 7/16 in.)
• Collection: Japanese Art
• Department: Japanese Art
• Accession number: 2022.242

A detail from the museum

Broad access to high-quality Chinese ceramics occasioned by the collapse of the Qing dynasty (1644–1911) and the dispersal of elite Chinese collections presented Seifū Yohei IV with models for both molded decoration and painted motifs.

Collection credit

Gift of James and Christine Heusinger

Further reading listed by the museum

• Vilbar, Sinead. Colors of Kyoto: Modern ceramics of Japan.” Cleveland Art: Cleveland Museum of Art Members Magazine 63, no. 2 (2023): 14–17.
• 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.