Tea Bowl (chawan)

This tea bowl features a freehand motif of a bird, painted in iron oxide brown on a buff slip under a delicately cracked glaze. The foot, left unglazed, bears a seal impressed with the “Kahin Shiryū” signature belonging to the eleventh generation of Zengorō, also known as Eiraku Hozen (1795-1854). The bowl is significant not only because of this signature but also because of its impeccable provenance: it comes directly from the collection of a Meiji-period army doctor, the father of the donor. The bowl has been cherished to this day in the shifuku (pouch) and tomobako (kiri wood box) it originally came in. The outermost box was added only in the 1990s, when the bowl was awarded a special honorific title by the fifteenth-generation Urasenke tea ceremony master Sen Genshitsu (Soshitsu XV).