Figures of courtesans, gods, demons, special characters, and animals in Japanese export ceramics of the late 19th and early 20th centuries are highly decorative and appealing to many. This study presents an engaging text and over 265 color photographs of beautiful and amusing figures in Hirado, Imari, Kutani, Satsuma, Studio works, and Sumida wares.

First published in 1990. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Ogata Kenzan (1663-1743) is Japan's most famous ceramic artist, and his work has had a far-reaching influence on the art of pottery, not only in Japan but, through Bernard Leach and his followers, the West as well. With his brother, the painter Korin, Kenzan was a member of the cultivated elite circle that transformed the world of Japanese design from the taste of a courtly few to a popular movement embracing every social class and encompassing all of the arts and crafts. Richard Wilson illuminates Kenzan's life and work simultaneously, tracing the phases of Kenzan's artistic and commercial development, their relationship to Japanese culture, and their bearing on the issues of authenticity and connoisseurship in Japanese art.

For more than 30 years, Dr. Anneliese and Dr. Wulf Crueger--guided by Saeko It�--have devoted themselves to studying, understanding, and collecting Japanese ceramics. Today, they share the rich fruits of their knowledge with this lavishly illustrated volume based on their own collection. The equivalent of Roberts Museum Guide, devotees of beautiful ceramics can pick it up and use it to select and visit potters as they undertake an artistic tour of the country. Organized geographically, it goes from kiln to kiln--which in Japan may refer to a lone site or an entire ceramics region that contains hundreds of workshops. Along the way, they outline the history, development, and unique stylistic characteristics of each area’s work, and the traditions that inspired it.

This translation of Kutani ware, by the late Nakagawa Sensaku, will introduce an area of Japanese ceramics that is at once unknown and altogether too familiar to Western connoisseurs and students of Japanese culture. The gilt-and-polychrome export porcelains produced at the Kutani kilns in the late nineteenth century, to which Dr. Nakagawa refers to the conclusion of his text, are probably collecting dust on the back shelves of most American and European museum storerooms and in attic chests containing the souvenirs of a great-aunt's grand tour of the Orient. The benefactor of the Fogg Art Museum, Mrs. Elizabeth Fogg, for example, seeded the new museum's collection with a donation of her own Kutani mementoes, including a number of bowls with the familiar "hundred ancients" motif.--pg. 11.