A Faceted Porcelain Bottle
A Faceted Porcelain Bottle

ARITA WARE, KAKIEMON STYLE, EDO PERIOD (LATE 17TH CENTURY)

Details
A Faceted Porcelain Bottle
Arita Ware, Kakiemon Style, Edo Period (Late 17th Century)
With pear-form body on a square base decorated in polychrome enamels and gilt over clear glaze, two opposite sides painted with chrysanthemums and two opposite sides with flowering plum, the elongated floral garland on the neck repeated on all four facets; wheel-cut and painted Johanneum inventory mark N=43 above oblong on base
9in. (22.8cm.) high
Provenance
Richard W. Weatherhead
A Lady, sold Christie's, London, 17 February, 1976, lot 32
Augustus II, King of Poland and Elector of Saxony (1670-1733)

Lot Essay

The bottle was purchased by Augustus II, or "Augustus the Strong," for his Japanese Palace in Neustadt, near Dresden. This was the renamed Hollandisches Palais which was doubled in size by 1729 to house his massive collection of Chinese, Japanese and Meissen porcelain. Inventories of the collection were intiated after 1721 and the pieces incised with a number and classification code. Kakiemon-style wares were assigned to 'kraak porcelains,' marked with an oblong. In 1780 the forty-thousand-odd pieces in the Japanese Palace were moved to the cellars. Around 1880 they were removed to the Johanneum Museum, Dresden. Items bearing the incised inventory numbers, known as 'Johanneum marks,' were removed from the collection at various times, but the largest number of duplicates in the collection was dispersed at auctions in 1919 and 1920.

For related bottles see Soame Jenyns, Japanese Porcelain (London: Faber and Faber, Ltd., 1965), no. 59C; Hayashiya Seizo, Kakiemon/Nabeshima, vol. 6 of Nihon no toji (Japanese ceramics) (Tokyo: Chuo Koronsha, 1972), pl. 96; ibid, Kakiemon, vol. 9 of Nihon no toji (Japanese ceramics) (Tokyo: Chuo Koronsha, 1974), pl. 98; Nagatake Takeshi, Kakiemon, vol. 5 of Famous Ceramics of Japan (Tokyo, New York and San Francisco: Kodansha International, Ltd., 1981), pl. 19; John Ayers et al., Porcelain for Palaces: The Fashion for Japan in Europe 1650--1750, exh. cat. (London: Oriental Ceramic Society and British Museum, 1990), pl. 111; Nagatake Takeshi, Yabe Yoshiaki, Minamoto Hiromichi, eds., Kakiemon no sekai ten: genryu kara gendai made (Exhibition of the world of Kakiemon: from its origins to the present), exh. cat. (Tokyo: Asahi Shimbunsha, 1983), pl. 79. For a bottle with stopper of the same form and design made by the Meissen factory circa 1725-30 owned by Augustus II see Friedrich Reichel, Early Japanese Porcelain: Arita Porcelain in the Dresden Collection (London: Orbis Publishing, Ltd., 1981), pl. 92.

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