Cleveland Museum of Art

Boat-Shaped Bowl with Plovers

Seifū Yohei III

Date

1893–97

Medium

Stoneware with crackled glaze and overglaze color enamel and gold

Culture

Japan, Meiji period (1868–1912)

Department

Japanese Art

Institution

Cleveland Museum of Art

Overglaze color enamels create a seascape made complete by the bowl’s boat shape. The bowl’s form inserts a human presence into the scene, much in the way rusu mōyō is used in paintings to suggest people just out of view. Rusu mōyō is a pictorial device by which the presence of someone physically absent from an image is conveyed through the depiction of clothing or other items. The inside of the bowl has a scene of plovers flying through the sky over a profusion of seaweed in sand below. In addition to the black, gray, and green of the overglaze elements, warm pink banding and mottling in the clay come through the glaze and are remarkably effective at suggesting the seashore. On the outside of the bowl, on each side, birds fly about grasses in search of a meal.

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