A rare and impressive Japanese Imari porcelain five piece garniture, late 17th/early 18th century

Private Collection, Luxembourg, until 2005;

Sold at Sotheby's, London, Japanese Works of Art, Prints and paintings, 10th November 2005, lot 947;

A&J Speelman, London;

An Important Private Collection, UK.

These vases are extraordinary not only in their uncommonly large scale and exceptionally well-preserved condition, but also in the fact that they have survived three centuries in the complementary group of five, as they would originally have been conceived. Their design incorporates a boat in Kano style and uses the rich iron-red, golden and underglaze blue colouring of the vivid Imari palette, are rare survivors of history that would have been deeply coveted in Europe in the late seventeenth century. A central component of connoisseurial European taste at this time was a wonder and admiration for the porcelain of East Asia, and the grandest houses expressed this through teeming ‘porcelain rooms’. These saw porcelain pieces of various sizes, both from China and Japan, arranged plentifully in a layered display that was intended to dazzle – these were well-documented in the designs of the Franco-Dutch furniture designer Daniel Marot, which were first collected into a publication in 1702 and had profound influence on decorative styles across Europe’s sophisticated cultural centres.1 A lovely period example of a chimneypiece heavily decorated with porcelain in the Marot manner is on display in Room 2.22 of the Rijksmuseum (BK-1968-134). Garnitures on a larger scale played an important role in porcelain-based decorative schemes because they were often placed in front of a fireplace during the summer months; given that rooms were furnished and arranged around the warmth of the fire, this meant that the colourful porcelain chosen to adorn the fireplace when the fire wasn’t in use would have been a focal point of the room.

Though the demand for large vases was strong, their size caused them to be susceptible to cracking in the kiln and so they were only ever produced in relatively small numbers. Where porcelain vases of this type do survive, they tend to do so in pairs or as individual examples –Elveden Hall had a large pair, for instance (88cm high),2 and a single a lidded vase slightly smaller than the present examples is at Osterley Park in Middlesex (NT 771313, 60.5cm). Generally, Imari porcelain garnitures that survive are smaller in scale, such as the pair of trumpet-form vases is at Treasurer’s House in North Yorkshire (NT 592441 and NT 592442 42cm) and the four-piece garniture in the British Museum (Franks.489, 40cm). A notable but somewhat different five-piece garniture at Spencer House, possibly for Althorp originally and featuring an unusual lacquer surface over its porcelain, sold at Christie’s in 2010.3

The name Imari comes from not from the place of production, since porcelains of this type were produced in Arita, but rather after the port in the Saga Prefecture through which this style of porcelain passed on its way to Nagasaki and then to international collectors – the nomenclature, then, reflects the fact that these exuberant, dense and highly chromatic porcelains were predominantly made for export. It stood in notable contrast with the sparser Kakiemon style that was also developed by the Dutch East India Company for an international clientele.

1 See D. Marot, Nouveaux Livre d’ornements, Paris, 1890 facsimile, pl.80 pl.82. Available at: <https://archive.org/details/nouveauxlivredor00maro/page/n170/>

2 Christie’s, Elveden Hall, Thetford, Norfolk, 23 May 1984, lot 2501.

3 Christie’s London, The Spencer House Sale, 8 July 2010, lot 1015.