Kinrande-style Bowl

Products of the Eiraku workshop, mostly those made under the direction of Wazen, Hozen’s son, were well represented at late nineteenth-century international exhibitions, including the 1878 Paris World Fair. These products became synonymous with the new, “modern” Meiji aesthetics. Ceramics loosely attributed to the Eiraku workshop were massively collected in the West in the last decades of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century, and there are many examples in both European and North American institutions. Our collection features a number of Eiraku-workshop kinrande-style bowls that were purchased in the 1890s by Donald Smith (Lord Strathcona and Mount Royal) from the William Scott & Sons gallery, reflecting the widespread taste for Japanese export ceramics at the time among wealthy Anglophones in Montreal.