Red Shino Cylindrical Tea Bowl (Beni-Shino Tsutsu-Chawan)

Beni-Shino Cylindrical Tea Bowl (紅志野筒茶碗), 1954, Brooklyn Museum accession 76.68. This 10.5-cm-high, 9.5-cm-wide cylindrical chawan exemplifies the Beni-Shino ("red Shino") variation of the historical Mino Shino ware that Rosanjin championed throughout the 1950s as a counterweight to the more famous classical Shino and Nezumi-Shino traditions. Where conventional Shino glaze pulls and crawls into milky-white pools over an iron underglaze, the Beni-Shino variant adds a pink-to-red blush from the iron content interacting with the kaolin-rich glaze under the cooling phase of the firing, producing the warm rose-and-cream surfaces for which Rosanjin became famous. The cylindrical (tsutsu) form is a winter tea-bowl shape — taller and narrower than the round summer bowl, designed to retain heat in the powdered green tea for as long as possible during a tea ceremony — and Rosanjin's interpretation of it foregrounds the tactile thickness of the wall, the deliberately uneven trim of the foot, and the calligraphic gestural mark of the potter's hand as design elements rather than corrections. The Brooklyn Museum's example is one of the most often-cited Beni-Shino chawan in any North American collection and was produced at the Hoshigaoka kiln at Kamakura, where Rosanjin worked continuously from the late 1920s until his death in 1959.