The deep porcelain dish is square in shape with chamfered corners. The vertical walls are thick as is the flat base producing a vessel that is firmly grounded, sturdy. The sides bow slightly outward with a noticeable raised ridge bisecting each side horizontally. The landscape scene on the interior might have been taken from an actual painting on paper or silk. A figure sits on a slope sweeping across the midground while in the foreground an earthy mound supports a roofed structure nestled beneath a tree. Proceeding into the background, a thatched pavilion dominates a barren bluff while distant peaks rise from the still water. Fragments of the main scene are depicted on each of four sides. The cobalt was swiftly and expressively brushed on the surface of the unfired porcelain, firing to a vibrant blue under the clear colorless glaze, its surface smooth and bright yet exhibiting spit outs, small pockmark-like craters, and some minuscule dark iron spots. There is significant flaking of the glaze from the lip rim and vertical corners where the sides of the dish meet while the unglazed base was textured when it was swiped with a blade or spatula.
As is typical for kosometsuke, the painting appears to have been executed as spontaneously and is as indelicate as the porcelain it decorates, while the glaze is true to form in its irregularity, blemishes, spit outs and abundant flaking from projecting edges. The components of the landscape subject here are standard within the kosometsuke decorator’s basket of tricks, the components arranged and rearranged in a variety of compositions that all have the signature kosometsuke effect and impact and must have had a great appeal to the Japanese that sponsored their production (figs. 1-3).
Deep dishes for serving comestibles during meals accompanying Japanese tea services are called mukozuke. The square form with chamfered corners is seen rather frequently in ko-aka-e (overglaze-enamel decorated) porcelains produced for this function; the underglaze-blue or kosometuske wares less so. A published dish that appears to accord perfectly in form and quality with the present dish is decorated with a drunken eccentric beneath a massive tree (fig. 4). The style of these two dishes is a perfect expression of the Chinese potter responding to the Japanese aesthetes desire for the unpretentious, artless, natural, unpredictable. When this taste was replaced by another with its focus on elegance and bravado, the square chamfered dish could serve that purpose as well (fig. 5).
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Fig. 1: A rectangular kosometsuke handled bowl, late Ming dynasty, early 17th century, after Kawahara Masahiko, Kosometsuke, vol. I, color plates, Kyoto, 1977, no. 81, p. 103.
Fig. 2: A round kosometsuke ewer, late Ming dynasty, early 17th century, after Kawahara Masahiko, Kosometsuke, vol. I, color plates, Kyoto, 1977, no. 95, p. 121.
Fig. 3: A rectangular kosometsuke inkstone cover, late Ming dynasty, early 17th century, after Kawahara Masahiko, Kosometsuke, vol. I, color plates, Kyoto, 1977, no. 107, p. 137 (bottom right).
Fig. 4: A square kosometsuke dish, Ming dynasty, early 17th century, after Toki Zenshu, vol. 15: Kosometsuke, Tokyo, 1965.
Fig. 5: Square kosometsuke dish with figural design and the flattened rim, late Ming dynasty, 17th century, private collection, after Julia B. Curtis, with contributions from Stephen Little and Mary Ann Rogers, Trade Taste & Transformation: Jingdezhen Porcelain for Japan 1620-1645, New York, 2005, no. 91, p. 110.
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