Vintage Japanese Woven Bamboo Mount Fuji Painted Plate, c. 1950–1975

The Piece

A shallow round plate woven from split bamboo, the strips laid in a herringbone that changes direction in bands so the surface catches light in alternating panels. The rim turns up in a soft continuous curve and the weave carries right to the edge without a binding, which takes more skill than binding it does.

Across the face is a painted landscape in sumi ink and light wash. Mount Fuji stands at the centre with snow streaking its upper slopes and a plume drawn off the summit, the pale disc of a low sun behind it. A stand of wind bent pines runs along the foot of the picture, with a spit of shoreline and still water beneath. The painter has signed at the lower left with a short column of characters and a second mark to the right.

The painting sits directly on the bamboo with no ground beneath it, so the weave shows through the wash and the texture becomes part of the picture, the woven strips reading as haze across the water and as texture in the slope of the mountain.

History & Provenance

Painted bamboo ware of this kind belongs to the Japanese export and tourist trade that reopened after the war and ran strongly through the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. Japan had a deep basketry tradition and an equally deep tradition of ink landscape painting, and the export workshops put the two together to make something light, inexpensive to ship, unmistakably Japanese, and attractive to American and European buyers who wanted to bring something home.

Mount Fuji with pines and a low sun is the single most reproduced subject in that trade, and it is reproduced because it works. The composition descends directly from the woodblock tradition, from Hokusai onward, and a competent brush can lay it down in a few strokes. The quality varies enormously across surviving examples, from a few careless marks to work like this one, where the pines are individually drawn, the snow is laid with a dry brush, and the ink is graded rather than flat.

Dating rests on materials and on the absence of a mark. There is no Made in Occupied Japan stamp, which was required on Japanese exports between 1947 and 1952, so the piece postdates that window. The unlined natural bamboo, the ink and light wash rather than bright enamel, and the artist signature rather than a printed factory mark all belong to the postwar decades of the trade rather than to the brighter, more heavily finished work that came later.

Product Details

Why It Belongs in Your Home

Hung, it is a piece of graphic art that happens to be woven; the ink drawing reads clearly from across a room and the banded weave gives it a texture no framed print can match. In a gallery wall of plates it is the one that is not ceramic, which is exactly why it works. Laid flat it is a catch all for keys and post on a hall table, light enough to move and handsome enough to leave empty. The warm straw colour sits well with walnut, rattan, linen and black, and it is one of the few decorative objects that costs almost nothing in wall weight.