Chawan (Watercolor Study of a Tea Bowl)

Chawan (Watercolor Study of a Tea Bowl), dated 27 April 1939. This watercolor study by Rosanjin records, in soft washes of color over a confident outline drawing, the form and surface effect of a tea bowl (chawan) — almost certainly one of the bowls he was producing at the Hoshigaoka kiln in Kamakura during the late 1930s, or a model for one — viewed from a three-quarter perspective that emphasizes both the silhouette of the rim and lip and the texture of the glaze on the body. As one of the relatively small group of preparatory or commemorative drawings that survive from Rosanjin's hand, the watercolor offers an unusually direct view into his design process: it shows him thinking through the chawan as a designed object in two dimensions before (or after) committing it to clay in three, with the same combination of confident calligraphic line and atmospheric coloring that he brought to his ceramic painting and his independent calligraphic work. The 1939 date places the sheet at a moment of consolidation in his Hoshigaoka practice, before the wartime restrictions on kiln fuel and materials, and the work survives in good condition as a record of his pre-war design sensibility around the central object of his career, the tea bowl.