Bottle with Incised Lotus and Peony Design

The Goryeo dynasty was the golden age of celadon production on the Korean peninsula, whilst production of white porcelain saw a general decline. Surviving examples of white porcelain from the Goryeo dynasty are therefore extremely rare, but study of excavated shards has revealed that items similar to this piece were made at kilns in Yucheonri, Puan-gun county, Chollapuk-do province, and these have been named ‘Puan white porcelain’ after their place of origin. This piece is one such extremely rare example of Puan white porcelain, of which only a very few examples remain, such as those in the National Museum of Korea, and the Museum of Oriental Ceramics, Osaka, Japan.
Although the incised peony and lotus branch design on four sides of the bottle are a little stiff in comparison with examples in the well-known large Ataka Collection of Chinese and Korean ceramics (Museum of Oriental Ceramics, Osaka), the scrolls around the collar of the bottle are conversely both complex and luxuriant.
This piece is one of seventy-seven items forming the Ryūsenkyo collection, a single donation made to Kyoto National Museum in 1984 by Kasakawa Masaaki, who was inspired by Yanagi Muneyoshi (1889–1961) 's folk crafts movement to collect Korean ceramics during the late 1930s and 1940s.