Blue and White Vase

This blue-and-white vase (sometsuke), held by the Brooklyn Museum under accession number 75.128.1, dates to 1945 and was produced at Rosanjin's Hoshigaoka Kiln at Kamakura. Standing 27 cm tall, it is decorated in cobalt underglaze beneath a clear feldspathic glaze in the long historical idiom of Japanese sometsuke ceramics descending from Korean and Chinese antecedents — an idiom Rosanjin took up with characteristic confidence and reworked through his calligrapher's understanding of brush and ink. The decoration includes a poem by Ryōkan (1758-1831), the Edo-period Sōtō Zen monk-poet whose calligraphic and poetic models Rosanjin admired throughout his life, demonstrating his habit of treating the vessel surface as a literati object that integrates pottery, calligraphy, and poetry in a single artifact. The vase was made at a difficult moment in his career — 1945 was the year of Japan's defeat, and the food, fuel, and materials supplies on which the Hoshigaoka establishment depended were extremely constrained — and it stands as a documentary example of the kind of work Rosanjin continued to produce throughout the war and immediate postwar period, on a scale that has rarely been adequately studied outside specialist Rosanjin literature. The Brooklyn Museum's piece is publicly available in high-resolution photography through the institution's open-access program and is among the better-documented Rosanjin objects in any American collection.