The Cleveland Museum of Art
Collection Online as of October 13, 2024
Tortoises Sake Pourer from Sake Pourers with Crane and Tortoises
1893–1914
Location: not on view
Did You Know?
This pair of seemingly humble sake pourers celebrate longevity and delight in a literary tradition that embraces multiple forms of poetic expression.Description
This flask has stencil-like paintings of three turtles—a young one with its parents—while the other in this pair has a crane with a leg raised. Cranes and turtles are well-recognized symbols of longevity in East Asia, with the turtle said to live for ten thousand years and the crane for one thousand.Each flask also has a poem on the back, one in Chinese and the other in Japanese. The latter, which appears on the turtle flask, reads kame iwaku kamiyo wa, ore no wakaki toki. The seventeen syllable poem begins with “turtle” and ends with “when I was young.” It can be translated as, “the turtle said the world of the gods began when I was young.”
- ?–2022James and Christine Heusinger, Berea, OH, given to the Cleveland Museum of Art2022–The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH
- Maezaki, Shinya and Sinéad Vilbar. Colors of Kyoto: The Seifū Yohei Ceramic Studio. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 2023. Mentioned and Reproduced: cat. no. 17, pp. 90–91, 61
- {{cite web|title=Tortoises Sake Pourer from Sake Pourers with Crane and Tortoises|url=false|author=Seifū Yohei III|year=1893–1914|access-date=13 October 2024|publisher=Cleveland Museum of Art}}
Source URL:
https://www.clevelandart.org/art/2022.159.2