The vessel is strongly constructed with fair thick walls, the eight sides straight and the vessel supported on a sturdy octagonal beveled foot around the deeply recessed base. A continuous scene unfolds over the eight sides with a male figure on a donkey in one, followed by an attendant in the next, and then some rocky outcroppings followed by a great pine with rolling pine-covered mountains stretching in the distance and two small birds aloft in the vacant sky. The underglaze cobalt, ranging from deep blue to fainter washes, was carefully applied to give appropriate detail to the figures and each element of nature. The bright, clear, colorless glaze adds sheen to the images and completely covers in interior of the vessel as well. The slightly coarse, dense, white porcelain body exhibits a smattering of minuscule iron specks where exposed on the unglazed foot rim. The fritting on the mouth rim and the protruding edges where the facets come together is a physical characteristic consistent with the kosometsuke family to which the jar belongs.
This vessel was designed and produced for specific function, one clearly described in an entry on a hexagonal example by Julia Curtis in her groundbreaking exhibition catalogue on kosometsuke: “Once filled with ash, this hexagonal charcoal container would have held a piece of burning charcoal with which to light a pipe. In Japan, tobacco became fashionable with tea devotees in the early seventeenth century. The host would place a tobacco tray (tobako-bon), holding pipes, a container for lose tobacco, and a charcoal container inside the waiting room for use before the tea ceremony.”1
These charcoal containers are quite under the radar in the study of the tea culture of Japan. Perhaps since they were not participants in the main act, the preparation and serving of tea, and were encountered and used even before one entered the tea room, they have not received the attention paid to other of their compatriots. Four-sided and circular hot charcoal containers were also produced but all of these various forms seem rather rare, at least among published kosometsuke studies or compilations. One example, however, precisely like the present was illustrated in what is considered the bible of kosometsuke by aficionados of the ware: Masahiko Kawahara’s Ko-sometsuke, the vessel presumably at the time of publication and likely still today in a Japanese collection (fig. 2).
Interestingly, the rider on a donkey becomes a recurrent motif in Shonzui wares, the next step chronologically in underglaze-blue porcelains produced at Jingdezhen for the Japanese market towards the end of the Ming dynasty. The motif is usually small, almost emblem like, a late-Ming period emoji (fig. 3). The sturdy construction of the present piece, the regularity in the form overall (despite the fact that all eight sides are not of equal width), the careful trimming of the foot, and the absence of kiln grit entirely are features that anticipate Shonzui wares .Since we know that kosometsuke, ko-akae and Shonzui and even kraak wares seem to have been produced at the same kilns in Jingdezhen, similarities, close relationships and crossovers between the wares should come as no surprise.
1.Julia Curtis, Trade Taste & Transformation: Jingdezhen Porcelain for Japan: 1620-1645, New York, 2006, p. 87.
Fig. 1: Kosometsuke charcoal container, Ming dynasty, ca. 1625-1640, Asian Art Museum, San Francisco, Effie B. Allison Collection, after Julia B. Curtis, Trade Taste & Transformation: Jingdezhen Porcelain for Japan: 1620-1645, New York, 2006, no. 66, p. 87.
Fig. 2: Kosometsuke charcoal container, Ming dynasty, first half 17th century, after Masahiko Kawahara, Ko-sometsuke, Tokyo, 1977, color plates, no. 118, p. 145.
Fig. 3: Shonzui mizusashi (water jar) with rider-on-donkey rondels, Ming dynasty, mid-17th century, Fujita Museum, Osaka, after Special Exhibition: Chinese Ceramics: The Most Popular Works Among Japanese, Kyoto National Museum, Kyoto, 1991, pl. 186.
(Fig. 3 emoji detail)
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