SIGNED YABU MEIZAN, MEIJI PERIOD (LATE 19TH CENTURY)

Satsuma ceramics are earthenware vessels ancestral to the Satsuma domain on Kyushu, a large island south of the mainland. Due to the vast influx of foreigners in Japan after 1854 numerous potters throughout Kyoto, Osaka, Yokohama and Tokyo took to making copies or pastiches of these wares, altering them far beyond their simple origins, many in an innovative Western form. Yabu Meizan (1853-1934) was at the forefront of this innovation.

Meizan regularly entered pieces at international exhibitions from Paris in 1889, Chicago in 1893, Paris in 1900, St Louis in 1904, Liege in 1905 and San Francisco in 1915 as well as every national industrial exhibition. In 1885 he won a bronze medal at the fourteenth Kyoto Exhibition and in 1904 and 1910 he won gold medals in St Louis and London.