Makers · 作家 · Kyoto
Tsukinowa Yūsen
月之輪涌泉Born 1908
A painter of Kyoto porcelain who began making bonsai pots for his own trees in his fifties. The record calls his work the summit of the small painted pot.
At a glance
- Art name
- Tsukinowa Yūsen 月之輪涌泉
- Real name
- 加藤護一
- Born
- 1908, in Tajimi, Gifu — into a potting family, the third generation
- Worked
- Kyoto
- Trained
- Gifu prefectural Tajimi ceramics school; porcelain painting under 石黒宗麿 Ishiguro Munemaro
- Trade
- A painter of Kiyomizu-ware porcelain, in Kyoto
- Bonsai pots
- From about 1961–62; at their height from 1965 to the early 1970s
- Bodies
- Porcelain, almost all small
- Marks
- Two recorded — 月之輪涌泉造 and 月輪山涌泉造
01 · 経歴 The route in
A painter first
He was born in Tajimi into a potting family, the third generation, and after the prefectural ceramics school there he went to Kyoto on his own.
He meant at first to be a painter. He became a painter of porcelain instead, learning the trade through work for Kyoto's yūzen dyers and studying porcelain painting under Ishiguro Munemaro. By about thirty he was earning his living with the brush.
Wartime labour conscription broke his health, and it troubled him for years. After the war he painted Kiyomizu-ware porcelain at home while he recovered, and kept bonsai.
02 · 盆器 The pots
Pots for his own trees
The bonsai pots began around 1961–62, when he was in his fifties, as pots for his own trees. He was soon sure of the forming, and began to paint them — in red enamel and in underglaze blue.
Begun for his own trees.
They were talked about among fellow growers and were later highly valued by Sugiura Kunio and others. His best years were the decade from 1965. At the end of it, his old illness, now joined by asthma, forced him to stop.
03 · 技法 How they were made
Porcelain, and two pairs of hands
Almost every Yūsen pot is a small pot in porcelain. Square forms were slab-built or carved from the block; round ones were thrown. He did not fire them himself — the firing went to Kiyomizu workshops and to individual potters' kilns.
Later he left the bodies to his son, Shunseki, and kept to the painting. For the round pots in particular, the record says, the result is in effect Shunseki's body with Yūsen's painting. The line continued to Shunseki's eldest son, Shōsen.
From 1971 to 1974 he gave the fifth Seifū Yohei a room of his house as a workshop, and they lived together. Pots with a Yūsen body painted by Seifū came out of those years.
04 · 回し絵 The painting
A picture that goes round
The record singles out one way of painting as his: mawashi-e, a picture that goes round. On a small square pot it runs from face to face, A to B to C to D and back to A.
Four faces, one landscape.
On the pot it describes, the four faces make one landscape: a pavilion looking over the water from under the crags; friends taking tea in a boat; a scholar pushing off from a waterside village; and across the water, another waiting in his study, reading or playing music.
05 · 落款 The mark
Two marks, and what they leave open
Two marks are recorded for him. The name element is written differently: 月之輪 in one, 月輪山 in the other.
| Mark | Reading | Note |
|---|---|---|
| 月之輪涌泉造 | Tsukinowa Yūsen zō | Recorded. The record does not say when or why it was used. |
| 月輪山涌泉造 | — reading not given in the record | Recorded. Two of the pots in the record carry this form. |
A mark is not the whole story
Pots with a Yūsen body painted by Seifū Yohei also carry the Yūsen mark. The mark alone does not settle who painted a pot.
Ask us
A pot with a Yūsen mark?
Send us a photograph of the underside and we will tell you which of the two recorded forms it shows — and what the mark cannot tell you.