Imperial vase

Country: Japan

Date of establishment: XVIII century

Height (cm): 180

Porcelain Story

This Japanese vase appeared in our collection 10 years ago. Its history is yet to be studied. Now it is only known that it began its journey to Kyiv, according to the person who brought it from Belgium, more than two hundred years ago on the Japanese islands. According to the technique of execution, it may well refer to the Edo era, and to the Taisho era, and to the Meiji era. The masters who created it must have been related to Satsuma or Kyoto. All this will still need to be clarified for a long time and meticulously.

In the meantime, I would like to draw attention to one completely indisputable circumstance. Namely, the truly unique size of this porcelain miracle. The height of the vase is 1 meter 80 centimeters. I look at it - and I can’t imagine what size the oven built for firing this vase should have been. I look at it and cannot imagine how long it took the artists to manually paint scenes of samurai equestrian battles and landscapes of Japanese settlements, as well as fragments of bright flower arrangements, in the smallest detail.

For example, I know exactly how much time was spent by the masters of the Spanish manufactory Lladro to create completely unique pieces that are stored in our collection. Some compositions took up to 10 thousand conventional man-hours (this includes the time spent by all participants in the technological chain of creating one such work!). How long did it take to paint such a large vase? I dont know.

There are many large vases in our collection - Italian, Ukrainian (Korosten), French, Chinese, German. There are vases 120, 130 and 140 centimeters high. There are Spanish vases that recreate relief plots of various everyday scenes - with many heroes of these plots, with translucent umbrellas in the hands of heroines ... All these vases are unique in their own way. But I have only seen vases of this scale, as presented to your attention, in the imperial palaces in Japan and China, and even, perhaps, in the royal palace chambers in Vienna, London or Paris.