The Cleveland Museum of Art
Collection Online as of December 13, 2025
Maple Leaf-Shaped Saucers
1893–1914
(Japanese, 1851–1914)
height (each): 2.5 cm (1 in.); width (each): 9 cm (3 9/16 in.)
Location: Not on view
Did You Know?
These saucers shaped like maple leaves show Seifū Yohei III’s “heavenly blue glaze.”Description
These maple leaf–shaped saucers, like Yohei III's 5 shell saucers CMA 2022.188, have a long, horizontal box with a separate compartment for each piece. Now a set of 5, these dishes were originally a set of 10, stored in two boxes of 5 each. From their housings, which accommodate differing numbers of objects, one can hypothesize that while some items created by the Seifu studio were intended to be acquired in larger sets, and thus were perhaps made to order, others, like these, may have been items to be purchased off the shelf in set quantities that allowed clients flexibility in scale.The box for thesev5 saucers describes them as “heavenly blue[–glazed] porcelain” (tenseiji). The veins of the leaves are slightly raised in the clay so that the glaze pools around them and they stand out as white where the glaze thins. There are longer lines at the points of the leaves and shorter ones following the wall of each indentation so that the design has both a horizontal and a subtle vertical dimension. Each saucer has a round foot.
- ?–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. 47, p. 121
- Colors of Kyoto: The Seifū Yohei Ceramic Studio. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH (organizer) (August 19, 2023-March 10, 2024).
- {{cite web|title=Maple Leaf-Shaped Saucers|url=false|author=Seifū Yohei III|year=1893–1914|access-date=13 December 2025|publisher=Cleveland Museum of Art}}
Source URL:
https://www.clevelandart.org/art/2022.191