Japan: Art and Its Essence
Japan: Art and Its Essence
Property from an Important Private Collection
Hosokawa Morihiro (b. 1938) | Large Iga storage jar
Lot Closed
July 26, 01:03 PM GMT
Estimate
5,000 - 7,000 GBP
Lot Details
Description
Property from an Important Private Collection
Hosokawa Morihiro (b. 1938)
Large Iga storage jar
oviform, the reddish stoneware body with dripped natural ash green glaze, numerous encrustations and kiln occlusions, fitted wood strorage box (tomobako), signed Futoan, inscribed Iga otsubo (Large Iga jar)
49.2 cm., 19⅜ in. high (the jar)
56.5 x 47.5 x 47.5 cm., 22¼ x 18¾ x 18¾ in. (the fitted wood storage box)
Koichi Yanagi
Hosokawa Morihio is the 18th generation head of the Hosokawa clan of daimyo, as well as the 79th serving Prime Minister of Japan. Retiring at the age of sixty to his family estate in Yugawara, Futoan, Morihiro took to the potter’s wheel. Apprenticing with the master potter Tsujimura Shiro, both of whom draw from Japan's vast ceramic tradition, Morihiro displays an understated elegance in his stoneware vessels. Morihiro likens making pottery to Zen meditation, explaining that ’when working with forces that have always existed, like clay and fire, I feel reduced to something insignificant, and yet completely at ease with myself’.
Further examples of Morihiro's works are in museum collections, including:
The Five Colleges and Historic Deerfield Museum Consortium, Western Massachusetts, accession number SC 2008.17.7, go to: https://museums.fivecolleges.edu/detail.php? museum=&t=exhibitions&type=exh&f=&s=4100 643&record=10
The Portland Art Museum, Oregon, accession number 2012.31.2, go to: http://portlandartmuseum.us/mwebcgi/mweb. exe?request=record;id=63822;type=101