Water Cooler with Chinese Gardens (1893–97): Art, History and Details

Water Cooler with Chinese Gardens (1893–97) 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:

Unlike most pieces by the Seifu Yohei studio, this one bears a seal beneath the handle rather than on the base. The glaze and technique are identified on the box as taihakuji, or “great white porcelain,” an important early invention Yohei III devised in 1872 that involved the combination of a distinctive translucent, creamy glaze over an ivory-colored clay body. The body’s two sides have garden scenes seen through windows. Designs of flowers and butterflies are incised in the spaces at both ends. The garden on the right-hand side of the vessel, seen through a round window, has a decorative rock with grasses beneath a cloudy sky; and on a tiled veranda, there is a teapot as well as a fan and two scrolls inserted into a double-handled urn or kettle atop a brazier. The garden on the left-hand side has two enormous flowers below what may be either a cloud or a rippling pond; a garden rock—or perhaps a carved wood sculpture—with a circular perforation sits on what appears to be a veranda. While the details may be open to interpretation, the setting is a rather glamorous Chinese residence or palace with a superbly tended garden in spring or summer.

Object facts

• Title: Water Cooler with Chinese Gardens
• Date: 1893–97
• Creator attribution: Seifū Yohei III (Japanese, 1851–1914)
• Culture: Japan, Meiji period (1868–1912)
• Type: Ceramic
• Technique: Porcelain with molded and carved designs
• Dimensions: height: 5 cm (1 15/16 in.); length: 15 cm (5 7/8 in.); width: 6 cm (2 3/8 in.)
• Collection: Japanese Art
• Department: Japanese Art
• Accession number: 2022.172

A detail from the museum

This water cooler has a handle with a dragon head.

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.