Cleveland Museum of Art

Saucer from Maple Leaf-Shaped Saucers

Seifū Yohei III

Date

1893–1914

Medium

One of five dishes from a set of ten; porcelain with blue glaze and molded design

Culture

Japan, Meiji period (1868–1912)

Department

Japanese Art

Institution

Cleveland Museum of Art

These maple leaf–shaped saucers, like Yohei III's five shell saucers CMA 2022.188 , have a long, horizontal box with a separate compartment for each piece. Now a set of five, these dishes were originally a set of ten, stored in two boxes of five each. From their housings, which accommodate differing numbers of objects, one can hypothesize that while some items created by the Seifu studio were intended to be acquired in larger sets, and thus were perhaps made to order, others, like these, may have been items to be purchased of the shelf in set quantities that allowed clients flexibility in scale. The box for these five saucers describes them as “heavenly blue[–glazed] porcelain” ( tenseiji ). The veins of the leaves are slightly raised in the clay so that the glaze pools around them and they stand out as white where the glaze thins. There are longer lines at the points of the leaves and shorter ones following the wall of each indentation so that the design has both a horizontal and a subtle vertical dimension. These saucers shaped like maple leaves show Seifū Yohei III’s “heavenly blue glaze.”

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