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Front view of the Nakazato Tarouemon E-Karatsu matcha bowl with bird motif, showing a wide deep form with pale grey feldspathic glaze, an iron-oxide bird in flight painted on the exterior wall, and an unglazed sandy clay foot ring.
Nakazato Tarouemon E-Karatsu Matcha Bowl Bird
Nakazato Tarouemon E-Karatsu Matcha Bowl Bird
Nakazato Tarouemon

Nakazato Tarouemon E-Karatsu Matcha Bowl Bird

Sale price$199.00

In E-Karatsu brushwork, a bird in flight is among the most demanding subjects — not because it requires detail, but because it requires none. The image has to read as movement with as few marks as possible, each stroke placed without revision on the coarse stoneware ground. The iron-oxide bird on the exterior of this matcha bowl is painted in a handful of strokes: a curved body, wings extended, the whole form caught mid-air. The pale feldspathic grey glaze carries it — speckled, mineral, absorbing the mark rather than displaying it. The bowl sits in the hand with the slight roughness of Karatsu clay, the foot ring unglazed, the sandy stoneware visible at the base. Karatsu ware's place in the tea ceremony tradition stretches back to the Momoyama period, when tea masters recognized in its unassuming character the qualities wabi aesthetics demanded. The Nakazato family has held that tradition across 14 generations and over 400 years in Karatsu, their lineage unbroken since the family was appointed as the official clan kiln in 1615.
Front view of the Nakazato Tarouemon E-Karatsu matcha bowl with bird motif, showing a wide deep form with pale grey feldspathic glaze, an iron-oxide bird in flight painted on the exterior wall, and an unglazed sandy clay foot ring.
Nakazato Tarouemon E-Karatsu Matcha Bowl Bird Sale price$199.00

Meet the Artisan

Nakazato Tarouemon

Karatsu ware has occupied the highest tier of Japanese tea ceramics since the Momoyama period, when the phrase "first Ido, second Raku, third Karatsu" fixed its place in the hierarchy that tea masters lived by. The Nakazato family has been at the center of that tradition for approximately 430 years, beginning with Nakazato Matashichi, appointed master potter to one of the 3 official domain kilns of the Karatsu clan during the Edo period and the first to carry the name Tarouemon. That name has passed through 14 generations without interruption. The chapter that determined what the kiln stands for today belongs to the 12th generation, Nakazato Muan. By the 20th century the techniques of ko-Karatsu, the iron-glazed, ash-fired ceramics that had made the tradition famous, had largely disappeared. Muan spent decades at excavation sites across the Saga hills, studying ancient sherds, and reconstructing what had been lost. Chosen Karatsu and Madara Karatsu exist in living form today because of that work. In 1976, the Japanese government designated him a Living National Treasure for the preservation of Karatsu ware as a whole. The 14th Tarouemon, born in 1957, trained under his father before assuming the name in 2002. He works at the kiln where that recovery happened, making Karatsu ware whose depth of tradition few workshops anywhere in Japan can match.