Jar decorated with genre motifs

The bulbous body of this Arita jar bears a band decorated with the genre motif of two beauties under an umbrella with their female servants walking in the rain across a wooden bridge with a balustrade in a landscape with architectural features, mountains, wayfarers, wild geese, bamboo and pine in the background. The ware’s rims are decorated with bands of the geometric pattern kikkō – tortoise shell – with inscribed rosettes of several types. The main genre scene with a beauty and her female servant is reminiscent of the well-known decoration that the Dutch East India Company commissioned from Delft-based faience and stoneware painter Cornelis Pronk (1691–1759) in 1734. Nevertheless, as the surviving designs by Pronk are somewhat different and the beauties motif is relatively frequent in Japanese porcelains, we do not believe this is a result of any Arita masters’ attempt to emulate Pronk’s designs. The question is to what extent existing designs influenced Pronk while he created his designs for the East India Company. (See Filip Suchomel – Marcela Suchomelová, Mistrovská díla japonského porcelánu, Praha 1997, p. 138.)