Vase (from the Chicago World's Fair Garniture)

This monumental cloisonné vase, designed by Araki Kanpo about 1893 and now in the Khalili Collection of Japanese Art (accession E010), is one of the most ambitious surviving objects of Meiji-period decorative-arts production and a key surviving example of Kanpo's work as a designer for the high-end cloisonné trade. The vase was originally part of a three-piece garniture commissioned for the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, the great international exhibition that introduced Meiji Japanese decorative arts to a mass American audience and that did much to consolidate the Western market for Japanese cloisonné, ceramics, and lacquer over the following two decades. The form is a massive pale-grey ovoid vessel; the front face carries eagles set against pine branches and rocky ledges with grasses and autumn foliage, while the reverse depicts further birds above turbulent water beneath snow-laden pine branches, and the neck is articulated by alternating chrysanthemums and paulownia mon (the imperial flower and crest) with applied stars. The handles take the form of chrysanthemums with simulated draped silk swags. The piece exemplifies the late-Meiji collaboration between nihonga painters and decorative-arts makers in which the painter supplied the design (shitae) and the workshop translated it into cloisonné enamel on silver wire over a metal body. Kanpo's role in such commissions reflects both his stature as the leading kachō-e painter of the moment and the more general Meiji practice in which the most prestigious decorative-arts commissions were ultimately under the supervision of nihonga masters. The Khalili Collection vase was acquired in the late twentieth century and is published in the Khalili Collection's Meiji catalogues.