Teapot with Cherry at Night in Gion (1893–1914): Art, History and Details

Teapot with Cherry at Night in Gion (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:

This side-handled sencha teapot with the cherry tree has a nearly spherical shape, and its recessed lid has an ovoid knob. It has both blue and a purplish brown under the glaze for the blossoms and embers on one side, and the vertical calligraphy identifies the tree as a cherry tree at night in the Gion area of Kyoto. To the right of the tree, smoke billows from a small lantern fire in a basket suspended on a post. In terms of collecting history, a paper inserted into the box of Teapot with Cherry at Night in Gion is of interest. It is a flyer for Yamamoto Shōseidō, a shop (no longer extant) that sold fine Kyoto ceramics in Osaka.

Object facts

• Title: Teapot with Cherry at Night in Gion
• Date: 1893–1914
• Creator attribution: Seifū Yohei III (Japanese, 1851–1914)
• Culture: Japan, Meiji period (1868–1912)
• Type: Ceramic
• Technique: Porcelain with underglaze blue and iron oxide
• Dimensions: Diameter: 8.5 cm (3 3/8 in.); width with handle: 11 cm (4 5/16 in.)
• Collection: Japanese Art
• Department: Japanese Art
• Accession number: 2022.165.a

A detail from the museum

This teapot features the Japanese theme of a blossoming cherry tree in the Gion area of Kyoto in underglaze blue and brown.

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.