The Beauty of Nabeshima Porcelain
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The Beauty of Nabeshima Porcelain
June 10, 2021 @ 1:00 pm - 2:00 pm
The Macdonald Lecture
Part of the Gardiner Signature Lecture Series
Speaker: Dr. Monika Bincsik
In this free online lecture, Dr. Monika Bincsik of The Metropolitan Museum of Art will explore the history of Japanese Nabeshima porcelain, produced in Hizen Province (present-day Saga and Nagasaki Prefectures). After the closure of the China trade in the mid-seventeenth century, the Nabeshima clan lords of the Saga domain no longer had access to the highest-quality porcelain decorated with overglaze-polychrome enamels. It became urgently necessary for the Nabeshima lord to replace Jingdezhen porcelain with local Hizen ware of a quality suitable for presentation to the Tokugawa shogun.
The Kakiemon family claims to have records proving that they were the first, in 1647, to successfully fire porcelain with polychrome-overglaze decoration. The first overglaze-polychrome porcelain dishes with refined patterns for the shogunate were produced in the Nabeshima clan’s kiln. This presentation will follow the development of various techniques and patterns through the eighteenth century, characteristic of the very high-quality Nabeshima ware, which was not sold commercially. Dr. Bincsik will also discuss the favored motifs in the wider context of Japanese decorative arts, especially textiles.
About the Speaker
Monika Bincsik is the Diane and Arthur Abbey Associate Curator for Japanese Decorative Arts at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. She specializes in Japanese decorative arts and textile. From 2008 to 2009 she was a Jane and Morgan Whitney Research Fellow at the Museum. Later she worked as a research associate at Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto, where she earned a second PhD on Japanese lacquers. As an Andrew W. Mellon Curatorial Fellow at The Met from 2013 to 2015, she conducted research on lacquerware, textile, ceramics, and netsuke. She was co-curator of Kimono: A Modern History (2014), and curated Discovering Japanese Art: American Collectors and the Met (2015), Japanese Bamboo Art: The Abbey Collection (2017), and Kyoto: Capital of Artistic Imagination (2019). She was also a co-curator for The Tale of Genji: A Japanese Classic Illuminated exhibition in 2019. She has published widely on Japanese decorative arts and collecting history.
Header image: Nabeshima dish with camellia, Japan, Arita, late 17th-early 18th century. Promised Gift from the Macdonald Collection
