1845-1923
male
tokyo-satsuma pottery
Born as the second son to father Shusuke, a carpenter, after training in pottery with Shinohara Riheiji at the age of 13, he opened an independent kiln in 1866 at the age of 21. However, in 1871, he closed the kiln, moved to Tokyo, and settled into a park residence around Shiba, Tokyo, where he worked with several potters to produce works by painting Uwa-e on unglazed pottery sent from Satsuma, which they then did all the processing for, making them the representative potters of ‘Tokyo Satsuma’.
In 1866, he returned to Nasubigawa in search of a more serious place to work, and set up a pottery studio named “Tohakuen. His first work, the ceramic Nikko Toshogu Yomei-mon gate, took about three years to complete. His exhibit was # 561 in the catalogue, and though called an ornament by organizer Yabu Meizan it was actually the roof of a ceramic replica done to scale of the Tokugawa Shrine at Nikko. The bottom 2/3rds of the replica were destroyed during an ocean storm in while in transit to Chicago.
There is a museum in Gifu Japan that can be of assistance, Also you can access this info from the Fine Arts Library at Harvard University and the World Exposition archives in Chicago could help. That year (1893) two great Masters (Naruse Seishi and Makuzu Kozan) spent 8 years and about 4,000 JPY (about 16,000,000 JPY in modern currency) on their exhibits. At the 1893 Chicago Colombian Exposition there were no gold or silver medals presented. That year the top award was a Bronze(Seishi), with only the second place Honorary Gold medal won that year by Kozan for a large pair of vases.
As an aside, Higuchi Ichiyo’s second brother, Toranosuke, apprenticed himself to a potter, Naruse Seishi, and trained to become a painter of Satsuma ceramics. Using Toranosuke as a model, Ichiyo’s novel “Umoregi” was published in the leading magazine of the time, “Miyako no Hana” (Flowers of the city), and became a memorable work that marked Ichiyo’s full-fledged debut as a novelist.
