Imari Porcelain Covered Trinket Box, Gosho-Guruma and Phœnix Decoration in Iron Red, Black, and Gold, Japan, c. 1960–1985

The Piece

A small round covered box in white porcelain, decorated edge to edge in the Imari palette — iron red, deep green, black, and gold, with touches of violet, yellow, and cobalt. The lid sits flush inside a fitted rim and lifts away cleanly. The whole thing is about the size of a teacup saucer and half as tall.

The lid carries a full scene rather than a pattern. A gosho-guruma — the ox-drawn court carriage of the Heian aristocracy — is drawn in green and violet with a spoked black wheel and blue ribbons trailing from its shafts, set against a ground of stylised cloud-and-wave. Around it, red camellia and white plum blossom crowd the field with bamboo leaves scattered between, and a hō-ō phœnix sweeps in from the left with its tail feathers streaming in red, green, and violet.

The rim is banded in black with gilt scrollwork and red cartouches. The sides continue the same vocabulary in panels: carriage, blossom, and peacock feathers, separated by narrow bands of black-and-gold key fret framed in red. Gilding outlines nearly every panel, and it has worn in places, which is what gold on porcelain does when a piece has been picked up and set down for decades.

History & Provenance

Imari takes its name from the port on Kyūshū through which Arita porcelain shipped to Europe from the seventeenth century onward. The palette that came to be called Imari — underglaze blue with overglaze iron red and gold — became one of the most influential decorative schemes in the world, copied at Meissen, at Worcester, at Derby, and eventually everywhere. Two centuries later the style was still being made in Japan, and it is that continuing tradition, not the seventeenth century, that this box belongs to.

The base tells you so plainly. It is marked IMARI in Latin capitals alongside Japanese characters, and it retains part of its original gold foil import label — enough of it to read APAN, from MADE IN JAPAN. Foil labels of this kind, together with the Latin lettering, place the piece firmly in the later twentieth-century export trade rather than the antique period. The decoration is transfer-printed with gilding applied over it, which is how these were produced in quantity for the gift and department-store market.

None of that is a mark against it. It is a well-drawn, densely decorated piece of Japanese export porcelain in excellent order with its lid intact, and it is honestly what it is: Imari in style and in descent, made in the second half of the twentieth century. We are not going to call it antique Arita, and no one selling it as such is telling you the truth.

Product Details

Why It Belongs in Your Home

A lidded box earns its keep in a way an open dish never can. This one takes rings and earrings on a dresser, cufflinks and a collar stay on a bureau, paper clips and stamps on a desk, or a single small thing you would rather not explain to anyone. The lid means the contents stay put and out of sight, which is the entire argument for owning one.

Visually it does a specific job: it introduces red. Most rooms are short of a true iron red, and a small object carrying a great deal of it will lift a shelf of neutrals more effectively than something three times its size. Set it on a stack of books, in a bathroom, or beside a lamp where the gold can catch light. A note on care: this is decorative porcelain with overglaze enamel and gilding, so wash it by hand in cool water with mild soap, never in a dishwasher, and keep it out of the microwave entirely. Do not scrub the gilded rim — the gold is applied over the glaze and will come away under an abrasive.