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Glazed Stoneware Tea Bowl – Chawan Style, Deep Brown Glaze – 20th Century
€35Bid from €31.50
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ProfessionalProduct description
Earth, glaze, and fire: almost nothing, yet everything is there. This stoneware tea bowl possesses that silent beauty immediately associated with Japanese ceramics. Its low, widely open form rests on a small foot of unglazed pale clay. A deliberately stripped-down silhouette, designed as much for viewing as for holding in the hands. Its glaze is its true richness. At its center, it becomes deep, almost black, shining like dark ink. Then, rising towards the rim, the material lightens and blurs with shades of chocolate, amber, bronze, and ocher. Small iridescent flecks appear in the glaze and change with the light. Nothing is painted. The design was born in the kiln, from the encounter between earth, oxides, and heat. This depth of browns and blacks naturally recalls the world of Tenmoku glazes, which originated in China, then were adopted and profoundly reinterpreted in Japan, where they found a privileged place in the art of tea. The bowl also embodies the spirit of the *chawan*, whose beauty never lies in cold perfection but in the balance of form, the feel of the material, and the variations left by the potter's hand. The underside is particularly interesting. The glaze stops before the foot, revealing the natural color of the stoneware, while an incised mark appears in the hollow of the base. Its author remains unidentified; we therefore prefer to preserve the piece's mystery rather than invent an attribution for it. Whether Japanese work or the creation of a Western ceramist steeped in this tradition, this bowl belongs to that great family of 20th-century ceramics that rediscovered in Japanese aesthetics another way of conceiving beauty: less demonstrative, more sensitive to material and gesture. With its approximate 13 cm diameter, it can naturally resume its function for tea. But placed alone, empty, it already becomes an object of contemplation. One of those seemingly modest objects that one eventually gazes at for a long time, simply because fire has left something in it that the hand alone could never have crafted.
Additional details:
- Brand: 20eSiecle
- Style: Japonais
- Style: Chawan
- Style: Tenmoku
- Material: Grès
- Material: Émail
- Colour: brun
- Colour: chocolat
- Colour: ambre
- Colour: bronze
- Colour: ocre
- Colour: mordoré
- Period: XXe siècle
Specifications
ConditionGoodColorsBlack
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About this seller
ProfessionalSaint symphorien des bois, FranceOn Whoppah since August 2026 • 0 sales