Vintage Japanese Amber Green Drip Glaze Bowls, Set of 4, c. 1925–1955

The Piece

Four small hand-thrown bowls in a deep amber yellow, each one splashed at the rim with grass green that has run down the wall and pooled. They were thrown on a wheel and not moulded, and the throwing rings are still there under the glaze, a series of soft horizontal ridges spiralling up the outside where the potter's fingers rode the clay.

The glaze is the whole point. The amber is translucent and glossy, going deeper where it has pooled and paler over the ridges. The green was laid on at the rim and left to find its own way down, so it has run in a different shape on every bowl, thick and dark where it gathered, thinning to a wash where it spread. Where the green meets the yellow there is a fine pale blue-white line, the reaction between the two glazes in the kiln, and on some of the bowls it has broken into a soft frothy edge.

The whole surface carries a dense, fine crackle with age settled into it. The foot rings are small and neat, and the clay showing at the edges is a pale cream.

No two are the same. Set them in a row and the green runs long on one, short and blunt on another, and reaches the base on a third.

History & Provenance

Amber yellow with grass green run over it is one of the great Japanese glaze pairings, and the effect here, colour deliberately allowed to flow and react in the kiln rather than being painted to an edge, is what the trade calls flambé.

The tradition these belong to has a clear centre. Awaji Island, in Japan's inland sea between Honshu and Shikoku, produced pottery from 1831, when Dr. Minpei opened the first kiln in the village of Iga. By the 1870s his successors Rikita and Sanpei were running separate kilns and exhibiting internationally, and export to the West began in earnest. The Danto kiln followed in 1883 and a third operation opened at Sumoto the same year. The kilns closed at the end of the 1930s.

What Awaji became known for is exactly this palette. Brilliant translucent lead glazes in grass green and in yellows running from pale lemon to deep amber, alongside cobalt, turquoise and aubergine, on a high-fired cream body that borders on stoneware, and always finely crackled. Flambé mixes, where the colours are allowed to run into one another, came in during the kilns' last and most inventive period, from 1922 to 1939. Pieces were predominantly thrown by hand rather than moulded.

Every one of those descriptions fits these bowls. We are still not going to call them Awaji, because there is no mark on any of the four and Awaji export pieces generally carry one. What we will say is that the glaze, the body, the crackle and the hand throwing all sit squarely in that tradition, and that a buyer who knows the ware will recognise it immediately.

On date, the flowing two-glaze effect belongs to the interwar decades onward, and the depth of the crazing and the staining in it say a long life rather than a short one. They are offered as c. 1925 to 1955, on the glaze idiom and the wear, with no mark present to tighten it further.

Product Details

Why It Belongs in Your Home

These are the size that gets used every day. Salt and pepper at the stove, olives, nuts, a dipping sauce, rings and keys on a nightstand, paper clips on a desk. Small bowls in a good glaze are the most-reached-for ceramics in any house.

They are also better in a row than alone. Because the green ran differently on each one, four of them together read as a set and as four individuals at the same time, which is the pleasure of anything finished by fire rather than by hand.