Shibayama-style incense burner in openwork with bird and flower design

This silver incense burner is covered with an openwork flowing water design. The body has panels on two sides, one with a bush warbler and cherry blossoms design and the other with a woven fence and chrysanthemums. The use of gemstones or coral inlaid in a wooden or ivory ground to create motifs is called Shibayama zaiku. Many craft objects for the export market were produced using that technique in the Meiji period.

Cloisonné incense burner with bird and flower design

This incense burner decorated in cloisonné on a black ground is in the shape of an ancient Chinese three-legged caldron or ding. Its sides are decorated with two bird-and-flower designs for spring and summer: small birds and plum blossoms and herons and irises. Cloisonné is a decorative enameling technique used on silver or copper in which the design is outlined by soldering delicate metal strips or wires to the metal surface, the resulting spaces (“cloisons”) are filled with vitreous enamel paste, and the piece is fired. In lineless cloisonné, the metal strips or wires are removed before firing.

Raku Ko’nyu
Dragon and tiger incense burner with green glaze

This ceramic incense burner in the shape of an ancient Chinese three-legged caldron or ding is entirely covered in green glaze. The lion and tiger motif symbolizes two powerful persons, neither dominant over the other. Raku Ko’nyu (1857-1932) was the thirteenth generation of the Raku clan of potters, which dates back to the sixteenth century. Ko’nyu and his father Kei’nyu kept the Raku pottery clan functioning in the years around the Meiji Restoration, when the tea ceremony was in decline.

Tomimoto Kenkichi
White porcelain incense burner

This incense burner was created to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the founding of the Takasago Perfumery Company. Its silver cover has, in openwork, the four-petal design that Tomimoto Kenkichi (1886-1963) liked to use. Tomimoto was a ceramic artist who created works of superb design. This incense burner with its clean-cut body covered in a glossy glaze presents a sense of great dignity.

Nagano Tetsushi
Cast Copper incense burner with cicada motif

This three-footed copper incense burner has three cicadas carved in relief on its cover. The cicada motifs are made to harmonize well with the straight, modern shape of the incense burner. Nagano Tetsushi (1900-1977) was a metal caster known as the leading creator of kettles for the tea ceremony. He conducted considerable research on premodern art and also wrote extensively on tea ceremony kettles.

Kato Takuo
Lusterware floral motif incense burner

In this incense burner, floral motifs have been painted in golden lusterware pigments on a blueish-white ground. Lusterware refers to distinctive ceramics and ceramic pigments with a metallic gleam that were produced in the Islamic region. The technique went into a decline from the eighteenth century on, but the ceramic artist Kato Takuo (1917-2005), fascinated by that technique, worked from the 1970s on to recreate it.