A RARE JAPANESE TENMOKU AND BLUE AND WHITE DISH

A RARE JAPANESE TENMOKU AND BLUE AND WHITE DISH

EDO PERIOD, C.1660-70

The shaped dish decorated with an elegant design of snow-covered banded hedges, the upper section in mottled chocolate-brown tenmoku glaze and the fences below rendered in underglaze blue, with old kintsugi gold lacquer repairs, a flattened rim and raised on a short foot, 15.5cm.

Provenance: purchased from Richard Barker Fine Art.

Exhibited: Asahi Shimbun, Ko-Imari Porcelain, Daimaru Kyoto, November 1992, and illustrated in the catalogue p.113, pl.131. The exhibition toured other Daimaru stores in Fukuoka, Osaka and Tokyo in 1993.

Cf. O Impey, The Early Porcelain Kilns of Japan, Arita in the First Half of the Seventeenth Century, no.48d where this very dish is illustrated. Also, see Ko_imari: A Catalogue of Hizen Porcelain from the Nezu Museum's Yamamoto Collection, p.72, no.274, for a related dih with the same decoration of snow-covered brushwood fences.