Antique 19th Century Japanese Imari Porcelain Vase— Hand-Painted Cobalt, Iron-Red & Gilt — Ribbed Form

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Description

Title:
Antique 19th Century Japanese Imari Porcelain Vase — Hand-Painted Cobalt, Iron-Red & Gilt — Ribbed Form

Description:

A hand-painted … Read more Title:
Antique 19th Century Japanese Imari Porcelain Vase — Hand-Painted Cobalt, Iron-Red & Gilt — Ribbed Form

Description:

A hand-painted Japanese Imari porcelain vase, 19th century, in the cobalt-blue, iron-red and gilt palette that has defined Western taste in Asian porcelain for three hundred years.

Why this palette is in your decorating vocabulary already

Imari porcelain was made at Arita in Kyushu and shipped to Europe from the port of Imari, which is how it got the name Europeans know it by. It arrived in the Netherlands in the seventeenth century and set off something close to an obsession.

What followed is the reason this vase looks familiar. Meissen copied it. Chantilly copied it. Royal Crown Derby built an entire body of patterns on it — still in production, still called Imari. The blue-and-red-and-gold scheme on this vase is not a Japanese curiosity in a Western room. It is the source of a pattern language that Western porcelain has been working from ever since.

Which is why it sits comfortably against English transferware, a Georgian mantel, blue-and-white, or a plain modern wall. It is already part of the grammar.

The painting

The decoration is entirely hand-executed, in layers, over two firings — cobalt blue painted into the raw body and sealed under the glaze, then iron-red and gilt applied on top of the fired glaze and fixed in a second, lower-temperature firing. Everything red and gold on this vase sits fractionally proud of the surface. You can feel it.

Three registers, reading downward:

The shoulder carries alternating cobalt and iron-red cartouches in diamonds and triangles, each filled with stylised flowers and heightened in gilt. A formal, architectural band — the frame for everything below.

The body is the piece’s achievement. An unbroken ground of shippō-tsunagi, the interlocking-circle “seven treasures” lattice, drawn in iron-red across the entire surface. Over it, large orange chrysanthemums open at intervals, with smaller blossoms crowding the spaces between. And punctuating the whole thing, bold cobalt blue leaf forms laid down as solid dark shapes — the visual anchors that keep a dense red-and-orange ground from floating.

The foot closes with a cobalt lappet band — stylised lotus petals rising from the base, the traditional finish.

The form

The body is moulded in vertical lobes, so the surface swells and recedes continuously around the circumference. This is a deliberate complication: every painted line has to cross ribs and hollows while still reading as a continuous pattern, and the ribbing catches light so the red lattice brightens and dims as the vase turns.

A tapered baluster rising from a narrow foot to a flared, everted mouth.

In a room

Fills with a single branch or stands alone. The palette does the work at a distance — it reads as a block of warm colour from across a room — and rewards close looking with the density of the drawing.

Specifications

Material: Hand-painted porcelain
Technique: Underglaze cobalt with overglaze iron-red enamel and gilt
Origin: Arita, Japan
Period: 19th century
Form: Ribbed baluster vase with flared rim
Dimensions: Height 21.8 cm × Diameter 14.5 cm

Condition: Good antique condition, with wear consistent with age.



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