Bowl with handle

This bowl was made for serving food during tea gatherings, where its striking design would have enhanced the delicacies on offer. Camellias, a winter flower, brighten the interior; ten white, yellow, and eggplant-colored blossoms with colorful dotted anthers stand out against a deep green background. On the exterior big green disks march across a ribbon-like handle and proceed down the sides, and a sprawling signature announces the artist’s name: Kenzan.

Ogata Kenzan’s novel ceramic designs sprang from his background as the son of a successful textile merchant in Kyoto. Like his brother and sometime collaborator, Ogata Korin (1658–1716)—one of the most inventive painters of his day (see page to the left)—Kenzan was attuned to the sophisticated, two-dimensional visual language of Edo-period textile design. In this case, the potter used paper stencils of the kind used to pattern fabrics to shape the stylized blossoms in thebowl’s interior and the disks that dot the outside. The designs are colored with a combination of white slip and glaze.

Kenzan had legions of followers and imitators, a fact that has spurred debates about the authenticity of surviving works inscribed with his name. A similarly shaped bowl preserved in the Hatakeyama Memorial Museum of Fine Art collection in Tokyo has camellias in the interior and white disks on the exterior inscribed in red with characters for good fortune. The scholar Oka Yoshiko identifies the dot patterns on both bowls as water droplets. She has argued that Kenzan designed bold, decorative works like these during the period when his studio was located at Nijo Chojiyacho in central Kyoto, before his move to Edo (Tokyo) in 1731.16