Ask the Scholar

Although the teapot here is stored in a separate box from the five cups, these six pieces may once have been part of a tea set that included other tools such as a water cooler. The teacups have orchid flowers on both sides in underglaze blue, as well as a blue band inside the footring. The teapot has the same design and a blue band painted around the bottom of the lid’s knob. <br><br>The cups’ long wood storage box is stamped on the exterior, over the lid and base, with a small red seal reading “Satō.” The same seal appears on five small squares of yellow textile, one placed in the bottom of each compartment in the teacup storage box. These are additional to the customary yellow cloths stamped with a “Seifu” seal. Interestingly, four of the Seifū cloths are stamped with an ovoid seal, while the remaining cloth, which is a slightly lighter color, has an unusual seal that is not quite gourd-shaped and with the <em>fū</em> of Seifū in a stylized, unrecognizable form. The teapot has its own box with a Satō seal and is wrapped with an orange textile stamped with the same unusual Seifū seal. <br><br>A set with a very similar surface design is in the Brooklyn Museum. The Brooklyn set has a water cooler and a small pitcher, in addition to the teapot and cups, and all are in a single storage box. This box records the tea tools as made with <em>kanpakuji</em>, or “bright-jewel white porcelain,” counted among Yohei III’s most important inventions, and carved images. In fact, both sets have a white surface much closer in coloration to the cool white of porcelain clay used in Kyoto at the time, and the designs are simply painted. The Brooklyn set was thus likely mismatched at some point with a box intended for another tea set. Nonetheless, the box may have helped prevent the set’s original components from being dispersed, and the set itself provides insight into how the other tools from the present set may have looked.