Teapot with Birds and Flowers (1700s): Art, History and Details

Teapot with Birds and Flowers (1700s) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

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

This small vessel was likely made as a teapot for the European export market. The different colored overglaze enamels, orange, blue, green, and yellow, combine with a wiry black outline to form the design of a singing bird on a flowering bough repeated on each side of the pot.

Object facts

• Title: Teapot with Birds and Flowers
• Date: 1700s
• Culture: Japan, Edo period (1615–1868)
• Type: Ceramic
• Technique: Porcelain with overglaze color enamel (Arita ware)
• Dimensions: height with lid: 13.3 x 7.8 cm (5 1/4 x 3 1/16 in.)
• Collection: Japanese Art
• Department: Japanese Art
• Accession number: 1964.250

A detail from the museum

The wood storage box for this pot refers to it as a suichū, which means water ewer.

Collection credit

Severance and Greta Millikin Collection

Further reading listed by the museum

• Catalogue of the Severance and Greta Millikin Collection. Cleveland, OH: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1990.

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.