A JAPANESE SMALL SAWASA 'PEACH-FORM' CRUCIBLE CUP

Edo period, early 18th century

With a gilt foot-ring and inside, with a handle to one side of the cup in the form of a leafy branch with prunus flowers, extending along the sides of the cup, ending in two leaves at the opposite end of the cup with a small rose on the rim, with a cartouche to each side with gilt floral sprays in high-relief, as well as a round cartouche with flower decoration.

H. 4.7 x W. 7.5 cm

Note:
For a Sawasa cup with saucer see Uit Verre Streken, November 2018, item 51.
For further reading see the exhibition catalogue, Japanese export art in black and gold, 1650-1800, Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, 1999.

Sawasa ware is a particular group of black lacquered and gilt artifacts, produced initially in Japan/Nagasaki and later perhaps also in China and Indochina. These wares are characterized by their European shapes and Asian/Chinese decorative motives. From the late 17th till the late 18th century, the Dutch VOC, but more so private merchants, used the Dutch trade base, Deshima in Nagasaki, to order precious Sawasa ware for the rich Eurasian elite in the VOC headquarters in Batavia but also to satisfy the taste for exotic rarities in Europe. With the collapse of the VOC, the occupation of the Netherlands by the French armies and of the Dutch East Indies by the English at the end of the 18th century, the production of Sawasa ware came to a sudden end.