Cleveland Museum of Art

Pheasants in Cherry

Seifū Yohei III

Date

1900–1914

Medium

Porcelain with molded and carved design, underglaze color, and cream glaze

Culture

Japan, Meiji period (1868–1912)

Department

Japanese Art

Institution

Cleveland Museum of Art

Like the design of Flower Vase with Phoenix in Paulownia ( CMA 2022.199 ), the pair of pheasants in a dramatic landscape setting on this vase was created by adding clay to the surface of the clay body and then molding and carving it. Here, instead of a typical white clay, Yohei III has used an ivory clay. He then added gradated pink around the complex design, which with its multitude of cherry blossoms must have been painstaking to mask with precision. For the birds’ eyes, he added a touch of yellow. He then fired the vase with an allover translucent cream glaze. The resulting kanpakuji piece is one in which an academic subject long favored by painters of the Kano school for screen and sliding door paintings in important buildings, that of impressively sized birds within a scene of precipitous, angled rock faces and twisting trees, is made soft and ethereal while retaining a sense of gravitas. The unusually large scale of this piece and the fact that he signed the base “Made by Seifū of Great Japan” also suggest that it was made for public display.

The authoritative record is held by Cleveland Museum of Art. LinkedCulture surfaces this object and its connections; it does not alter institutional metadata.