Sweets Bowl with Chrysanthemums

Sweets bowls hold the confections enjoyed when drinking tea. This bowl and CMA 2022.206 offer an important lesson in appreciating Yohei IV’s ceramic practice. While they have the same design and shape and are made with the same materials, the execution of the pieces makes them entirely different after 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. For both bowls here, Yohei IV used his father’s kanpakuji formula, with underglaze pink for the gradated wash of color surrounding the flowers.

The storage box lid provides abbreviated descriptions of the complex processes used in the surface decorations. It identifies the bowl as “Sweets dish with carved picture of chrysanthemum in kanpakuji.” The box has Yohei IV’s signature on the lid’s exterior, along with a seal reading “Seizan Seifu” 成山清風. The ink inscriptions are done in an elegant semiformal calligraphy. This bowl is more subtle and smooth in both the effect of the glaze and the execution of the relief. The designs are centered on the body between rim and foot. 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 this subtle bowl are gentler, finishing in a tapering out of the strokes. Those on the bold bowl, CMA 2022.206, end in triangular pinheads.