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

Water Cooler 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 kidney-shaped water cooler, yuzamashi, has a scene of a man gazing at a full moon in a dramatic mountain-scape stretching before a large compound in the woods. Another man, hunched over and carrying a heavy parcel tied to a pole over his shoulder, struggles to make his way up a hill to the site. The cooler also has a pair of applied nyoi staff-head forms for resting the tips of one’s thumb and index finger.

Object facts

• Title: Water Cooler 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: 5.4 x 11.9 x 7.4 cm (2 1/8 x 4 11/16 x 2 15/16 in.)
• Collection: Japanese Art
• Department: Japanese Art
• Accession number: 2022.171.2

A detail from the museum

This is a yuzamashi, a container used to cool boiled water to just the right temperature for the best flavor when steeping.

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.