Page 146 - Japanese Art Nov 9 2017 London

SATSUMA E ARTHENWARE
(LOTS 250 - 291)
GILDING THE FOUR SEASONS
Satsuma ware was first manufactured in 1600 when
Lord Shimazu invited Kinkai, one of hundreds of Korean
potters who had emigrated to Japan, to open a kiln in
his Satsuma domain located in the far south of Kyushu.1
The earliest examples were made from dark clay with
a high iron content covered with a black glaze, but
following the discovery of a local white clay Satsuma
potters also started to produce lighter-coloured wares,
the ancestors of the crackle-glazed works illustrated
on the following pages. Throughout the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries, and most likely well into the
nineteenth century, the ceramics made in Satsuma were
as different as it is possible to imagine from the minutely the word ‘Satsuma’ soon lost most of its geographical
decorated pieces illustrated here, but local tradition
relates that at some point a group of potters was sent to
Kyoto to study the art of enamelling. The earliest known
enamelled Satsuma wares, probably dating from as late
as the 1860s, bear a passing resemblance to much
earlier pieces produced in Kyoto, suggesting that there
may indeed be some connection between the two.
The Japanese displays at the Paris Exposition of
1867 included examples of what would later be called
Satsuma ware. These were still relatively simple, but in
the short space of eight years between 1867 and 1875,
when George Ashdown Audsley and James Lord Bowes
published their lavish and monumental Keramic Art of
Japan, something extraordinary happened: not only did
the decorated wares become much more elaborate,
but enamelled Satsuma suddenly acquired a long and
totally unsubstantiated history. Audsley and Bowes were
144 | BONHAMS
already aware that the longevity of Satsuma was being
exaggerated but they still suggested that it might date
back two and a half centuries, while in 1877 a London
sale of ‘old Satsuma’ featured pieces supposedly made
for presentation to the Pope in the sixteenth century! Not
until the 1890s was some semblance of chronological
plausibility restored.
The international popularity of Satsuma, when presented
at events such as the 1873 Vienna Weltausstellung
(World Exposition), encouraged potters from all over
Japan to try their hands at making the ware, so that
sense, although sometimes the bodies were still
thrown and fired in Kyushu and then sent elsewhere
for decoration. In an effort to maintain the connection
with the Satsuma domain, some examples (such as
lot 270) are marked with the distinctive mon (family
crest) of the Shimazu family, consisting of a cross in a
circle, often in gold on a red ground, but in the Western
imagination ‘Satsuma’ was no longer a place. Instead
it encompassed a romantic vision of the exotic orient
and so it has remained to this day, even though this
supposedly most Japanese of products incorporated
a number of recently invented Western techniques and
was later influenced by European ceramics brought
back from the international expositions: for example,
most of the distinctive gilt colour in Satsuma wares
manufactured at Awataguchi in Kyoto was made from
‘liquid gold’, a material developed at the Meissen factory
in Germany.