Miyagawa (or Makuzu) Kōzan (1842–1916) is enjoying a revival among collectors today—and with good reason. A remarkably prolific artist whose activities spanned the entire Meiji era (1868–1912), he produced ceramics of dazzling technical bravura, of subtle tonalities, and of painterly effects. His name is associated with wares in the Satsuma style; giant vases intricately decorated in high relief; stonewares in the manner of Ninsei and Kenzan; celadons; and, above all, with elegant porcelains featuring softly blurred underglaze landscapes, floral, and animal décor. Although Kōzan’s protean talents made him an international celebrity during his lifetime and his work has been highlighted in many recent exhibitions, he has been largely overlooked in mainstream Meiji scholarship, which has tended to focus on questions of artistic ideology. Yet as Clare Pollard, an Oxford-trained ceramics specialist, demonstrates, critical analysis of the career of a single artist based on a close reading of primary documents can also engage the larger, often contentious, cultural issues of the period.

The Yokohama workshop founded by Kōzan made ceramics for domestic and international consumption from 1871 until the 1950s. While Pollard’s study covers Kōzan’s successors Makuzu Kōzan II (1859–1940) through IV (1884–1959), the thrust of her investigation is the studio’s founder, an adventurous pioneer who decamped from Kyoto to Yokohama—only to discover that there were no local clays. Kōzan was a congenital risk-taker and compulsive experimenter. Having quit a family ceramics business that had produced tea ceremony wares since the 1830s and with little experience in international trade, he set out to cater to the growing export market. Within years of his inauspicious beginnings in Yokohama, using clays from Shigaraki, Saga, and even the Shinobazu pond in Tokyo, he was running a successful workshop with more than a dozen apprentices. His output during the 1870s ranged from Satsuma wares, whose brocade-like décor of overglaze enamels and gold especially appealed to Victorian tastes, and sculpturesque vases, to porcelains and even cloisonnés.

The technical virtuosity and picturesque detail of a monumental vase, elaborately decorated in high relief with a hawk on a flowering branch (bought in the 1870s by the South Kensington Museum, now the Victoria and Albert Museum), is characteristic of Kōzan’s early-period work. Although such marvels of the ceramicist’s art caused a sensation when displayed at the Philadelphia and Paris International Expositions of 1876 and 1878, by the 1880s his work was beginning to fall out of favor because of its fragility and extreme degree of minute decoration. Declining demand prompted the ever-adaptable Kōzan to redirect his efforts to the domestic market. His ceramics from this period draw inspiration from traditional Kyoto teawares, from Chinese underglaze blue-and-white porcelains, as well as unglazed stonewares from Southeast Asia—the style known in tea-ceremony circles as Namban. With domestic sales providing an economic cushion, he then devoted himself to developing new ceramic forms, glazes, and bodies more appealing to the international market. He experimented with traditional glazes as well as with new Western chemical glazes and techniques introduced by Gottfried Wagener, an Austrian chemist who, during his twenty-four years in Japan, helped to lay the foundations for the industrialization of Japanese ceramics, cloisonné, and textile dyeing.

Kōzan’s research into what were known in Japan as yōhen techniques (“kiln transmutation”) resulted in the production of a wide array of monochrome and underglaze polychrome porcelains that recreated the effects of peach bloom, oxblood, and other Chinese ceramic color types prized at the time by European and American collectors. Porcelains with metal oxide-based glazes fired in a reduction kiln at temperatures of more than 1,300 degrees celsius had been produced during the seventeenth century in the Chinese Imperial porcelain factories at Jingdezhen, but by the nineteenth century the techniques had been lost in China. Kōzan’s “rediscovery” of this technique as well as his use of painterly treatments—such as bokashi (graded coloring)—brought his studio great acclaim.

Kōzan’s escalating talents were recognized both nationally and internationally. In 1896 he became the second of two ceramicists to be designated an Imperial Household Artist (Teishitsu gigeiin). At the Paris Exposition of 1900, he was awarded a Grand Prix for a set of colossal stoneware vases and a matching basin decorated with flowers and grasses on a mirror-black glaze base. Once again, Kōzan’s sensitivity to international taste paid off: Chinese famille noire porcelains, the rage at the time, were also emulated in Meissen, Sèvres, Royal Copenhagen, and Rookwood.

The stylistic and technical advances that enabled his Yokohama studio to flourish during such a long time span, when so many others failed, testify to Kōzan and his adoptive son Hanzan’s exceptional business acumen and artistic sophistication. To keep up with European and American fashions, Hanzan traveled to the Chicago Columbian Exposition of 1893, taking notes on competitors’ displays. Following the exhibition he also visited art potteries in the United States, most notably Rookwood, which, under the guidance of Shirayamadani Katarō (1865–1948), had been experimenting with transmutation glazes. Later, Hanzan also visited Sèvres.

Such activities underscore the importance of interpreting artistic trends throughout the Meiji era, but especially during its last decade, in an international framework. The reciprocal and mutually reinforcing relationships among the forms, techniques, and decorative styles of the Kōzan studio and those of Royal Copenhagen, Rookwood, and Sèvres were not isolated phenomena. A similar trend informed developments in both Nihonga and Yôga painting. The flow of information made possible by the new ease of travel, photography, and international expositions contributed to complex artistic crosscurrents whose nature is only beginning to be explored.

It is one of the strengths of this book that Pollard provides a rigorous analysis of the stylistic and technical evolution of Kōzan’s work in relation to these and other important issues. Even as she traces his career chronologically, supporting her presentation with a wealth of empirical detail, she weaves into this narrative larger themes central to the discourse on Meiji culture. How did Yokohama figure in the imaginations of artists of the early Meiji era? How did artists of the period cope with the shifting, multiple, and sometimes contradictory demands of a national and international audience? Should Kōzan be characterized as an “artist potter” or an “industrial potter”? Pollard addresses this last question and its implications for the Kōzan studio particularly nimbly, with a succinct analysis of the semantic inconsistencies and vagaries in the use of the terms bijutsu (art), kōgei (craft), and bijutsu kōgyō (industrial art), all newly coined in the early Meiji era.

Master Potter of Meiji Japan: Makuzu Kōzan (1842–1916) and His Workshop has much to offer historians of Meiji art and culture, but this should not be its sole or even primary audience. Specialists in ceramics will welcome the information about workshop practices, pigments, and glazing techniques. Museums and collectors will find the photographic records of marks painted or impressed on Kōzan’s pots, and of box inscriptions, indispensable. Unfortunately, the book’s $150 price will prevent most academics from acquiring a personal copy.

This book, which takes as its focus a “master potter” of the Meiji era, appears at a time when such monographic studies are viewed by some scholars as passé. Yet by examining the artist within the economic, political, and cultural context of the Meiji era, Pollard illuminates many larger questions. Kōzan makes a strong case for her argument that the Meiji era saw extraordinary creativity and innovation in the crafts. Many of the issues she addresses in relation to his career, moreover, resonate with the activities of other cultural figures of the era. Pollard’s critically astute handling of her subject demonstrates that the monograph still offers a meaningful format for exploring larger issues in a focused way. Those studies that view Meiji art and culture through the prism of the institutional and linguistic restructuring carried out during this period, valuable as they are, can also obscure the nature of artistic practice and rob individuals of their voices. It is therefore most welcome to find a study that reminds us that if we are to retrieve the realities of the Meiji past, we must get closer to those who lived it, by looking from the ground up.