Teacup from Tea Set with Chinese Landscape (1893–1914): Art, History and Details

Teacup from Tea Set with Chinese Landscape (1893–1914) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Seifū Yohei III (Japanese, 1851–1914).

The work and its context

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

The theme of this sencha tea set is the Chinese scholar-recluse in an idyllic landscape. Each of the five teacups has a landscape with an architectural structure and some human activity. This tea set has a side-handled pot called a kyūsu, used for steeping, straining, and serving tea. Unlike some others, this set also has a yuzamashi, a container used to cool boiled water to just the right temperature for the best flavor when steeping. Seifū Yohei III’s painting teacher, Tanomura Chokunyū (1814–1907), made a visual record of famous sencha events that shows how these kinds of porcelains fit with objects such as a stove and kettle to form a complete set of utensils for tea preparation, and with ensembles of decorative objects meant to inspire creativity

Object facts

• Title: Teacup from Tea Set with Chinese Landscape
• Date: 1893–1914
• Creator attribution: Seifū Yohei III (Japanese, 1851–1914)
• Culture: Japan, Meiji period (1868–1912)
• Type: Ceramic
• Technique: Porcelain with underglaze blue
• Dimensions: 5 x 8.2 cm (1 15/16 x 3 1/4 in.)
• Collection: Japanese Art
• Department: Japanese Art
• Accession number: 2022.171.4

A detail from the museum

This cup has a man walking toward a group of three pavilions announced with a banner hanging from a tall post; beyond this are two large deciduous trees sheltering a stand of small conifers. Across the water from this site is another man sitting on the bank fishing with a large woven basket for his catch beside him.

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.
• Goodall, Hollis. "Seifū Yohei III: Master of Finesse." Impressions: The Journal of the Japanese Art Society of America 45, part 2 (2024): 178-193.

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.