Sweets Bowl with Chrysanthemums

Sweets bowls hold the confections enjoyed when drinking tea. This bowl and CMA 2022.207 offer an important lesson in appreciating Yohei IV’s ceramic practice, for while they have the same design and shape and are made with the same materials, the execution of the pieces makes them entirely different upon close inspection, thereby demonstrating the range of possible production results from a single template. Each bowl has the same composition of two different types of chrysanthemum flowers, one with long, slim, knifelike petals and the other with short, rounded, multilayered petals, shown running around its surface in low relief. The centers of the flowers are painted with yellow under the glaze. Yohei III formulated a number of new underglaze colors during his career, and this is likely one of them.

The storage box lid provides abbreviated descriptions of the complex processes used in the surface decorations. It identifies the bowl inside as “Sweets dish with picture of chrysanthemum in kanpakuyū.” The box lid has on its exterior the seal reading “Seizan Seifu” 成山清風, which includes Yohei IV’s style name, but no signature. Instead, a signature is found on the interior of the box lid, accompanied by another seal, this time a gourd-shaped seal reading “Seifu.” The ink inscriptions are in a mode closer to formal script.

This bowl, with the signature on the inside of the box lid, stands out for a distinctively bubble-filled glaze with a heavier pink effect, as well as more noticeable yellow at the flowers’ centers and deeper carving in the relief decoration. The design has crept much closer to the rim. A closer look at the delineation of the flower petals reveals that the designs differ at times with respect to which petals appear in front or behind others.

The centers of the bases of both bowls are incised with “Seifu” in a manner matching many other works by Yohei IV, although there are slight differences. As one might expect from the other differences in the bowls, the characters on the base of the subtle bowl, CMA 2022.207, are gentler, finishing in a tapering out of the strokes. The strokes on this bold bowl end in triangular pinheads.