Ogata Kenzan - Tea Bowl (Cha-wan), 19th century

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This Japanese tea set has four pieces: a bowl, scoop, whisk, and a jar. The round tea drinking bowl has a wide mouth and  a slightly tapered body that abruptly narrows near the bottom into a small, shallow foot. The inside is a rosy cream color freckled with brown. The exterior has the same ground color but adds stylized designs of a fish, a small basket, and another sea creature in deep brown. The bowl has been broken and repaired with gold lacquer which makes irregular gold lines and a filled triangle. The scoop, to transfer and measure the tea, is long and narrow and made of white ivory. The whisk, to dissolve powdered tea, is of brown bamboo and shaped like a shaving brush. The stoppered jar is a simple tall, narrow cylinder of reddish brown color. It has a small white, round stopper and a pair of thin, small handles on opposite sides. Inscribed (base of bowl): Kenzan 

Style of Ogata Kenzan (Kyoto, 1663 - 1743, Kyoto)

Okakura Tea Set: Tea Bowl (Cha-wan) with Design of Cormorant Fishing ("Summer tea bowl"), 19th century

Ceramic with cobalt and iron pigments under clear glaze; broken and repaired with gold-sprinkled lacquer , 6.4 x 12.8 cm (2 1/2 x 5 1/16 in.)

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Commentary

Although the box inscription and the signature on the base of the bowl itself represent the bowl as the work of the famed Kyoto ceramic artist Kenzan, it is no understood to be a later work in the pervasive and enduring Kenzan style. The bowl had been broken in Japan and repaired with gold-sprinkled lacquer. The motif of cormorant fishing suits this bowl to use in the summer months when cormorant fishing takes place on Japanese rivers, but in modern usage it would be classified not as a "summer tea bowl" but as a bowl for preparation of "thin tea" (usucha). It may have been made originally as part of a set of lidded bowls for serving food.

Source: Louise Allison Cort, "Mrs. Gardner's 'Set of Tea-Things,'" in in Journeys East: Isabella Stewart Gardner and Asia, edited by Alan Chong and Noriko Murai (Boston: ISGM and Gutenberg Periscope, 2009): 395.