Imari-yaki – The Porcelain That Conquered Europe's Royal Courts

In the display cabinets of European palaces, they still stand side by side today: lidded vases, ornamental plates, and jugs in deep cobalt blue, rust red, and gold, painted so densely that hardly a spot of the white ground remains free. The name under which these pieces have been traded for over three hundred years designates neither a workshop nor a glaze, but a small harbor on the northwest coast of Kyūshū: Imari. How a loading port became a brand name, and how Japanese porcelain rose within a few decades to become Europe's most coveted luxury good, is a story of war, chance, and an extraordinarily keen sense for foreign taste.

What Is Imari-yaki?

Imari-yaki (伊万里焼) refers to Japanese porcelain from the region around Arita in Saga Prefecture on the island of Kyūshū, which was shipped via the nearby port of Imari. The term originally describes not a kiln or a technique, but a trade route. In Europe, a second, narrower meaning has developed from this: here, Imari decor refers to a dense, often all-over painting of underglaze blue, complemented by overglaze colors in iron red and gold, occasionally with black contour lines. The body is genuine hard-paste porcelain – thin-walled, ringing brightly when struck, slightly translucent at its thinnest points. The cobalt-bearing blue pigment applied before the glaze firing is called gosu (cobalt blue painting medium) in Japanese; it withstands the high firing temperature, while red and gold are applied to the finished glaze only in a second, significantly cooler firing. Both meanings – designation of origin and designation of decor – have run alongside each other to this day, and are the reason why one and the same piece may be listed as Arita or as Imari, depending on the catalog.

A Port Gave the Porcelain Its Name

Arita and Imari lie roughly fifteen kilometers apart. Firing took place inland, loading took place on the coast: the finished ware traveled overland and along the Imari River to the port, where merchants transferred it onto ships. For the Japanese market it went to Osaka and other ports; for export it went to Nagasaki, where the Dutch East India Company (VOC) maintained its only trading post in Japan on the artificial island of Dejima. Because goods at the time were usually named after their port of shipment, this porcelain soon came to be called simply Imari - even when not a single piece of it had been made in Imari itself. The history of its production, however, from the discovery of porcelain stone near Arita in 1616 to the Kakiemon and Iro-Nabeshima styles, belongs to the related topic of Arita-yaki. This duplication is the source of the confusion that still accompanies collectors today.

China's Dynastic Change and the Gap in World Trade

That Japanese porcelain came to Europe at all is owed to a collapse elsewhere. For centuries China had dominated the world market, above all the vast kilns of Jingdezhen, whose blue-and-white ware reached European households by way of Lisbon and Amsterdam. With the fall of the Ming dynasty in the 1640s and the long struggles until the consolidation of Qing rule, production there fell into disorder, transport routes became unsafe, and exports at times collapsed almost entirely. The East India Company, which had been supplying its European customers with Chinese blue-and-white for decades, found itself without goods and sought a replacement. It found one in the province of Hizen, present-day Saga: the kilns around Arita had been firing true porcelain for only a few decades and were by then able to deliver larger quantities of consistent quality.

1659 and the First Large Order of the Dutch East India Company

1659 is generally regarded as the key year of the Europe trade. Zacharias Wagenaer – born in 1614 in the Dresden Neustadt, in Dutch service – was at that time heading the trading post on Dejima for the second time and placed an order that was explicitly to be made to European taste: a service of around two hundred pieces, blue and white and richly painted with flowers. That same year, shipments in the order of several tens of thousands of pieces left the country. What began as a stopgap solution quickly became a business model: the Company sent samples and measurements to Arita, and the workshops there worked accordingly. This gave rise to vessel forms in Japanese porcelain that did not exist in Japan at all – commissioned work for a market the potters never set eyes on. Individual details regarding the year and scope of this first order vary in the literature.

Ornate Vases for Europe, Everyday Tableware for Japan

The heyday of export fell in the last third of the 17th century. What was in demand in Europe were not tea bowls, but representational pieces: tall lidded vases, lined up as garnitures of three or five on mantelpieces and cabinet cornices, ornate plates of considerable diameter, jugs and tureens. For the Japanese market, an entirely different range emerged in parallel: rice bowls, plates in sets of five, tokkuri (sake bottles), guinomi (small sake cups), and yunomi (everyday tea cups) – tableware that was used rather than displayed. This dual orientation still shapes the picture today: anyone who wants to buy a Japanese sake cup moves within the same world of forms that was already developed for domestic use in the 17th century, while the heavy gold decoration was made primarily for the gaze from outside. Anyone who looks at both lines side by side quickly recognizes that the lavish gold decoration did not arise from Japanese everyday use, but from the demand of a distant market.

Kinrande: Blue Under, Red and Gold Over the Glaze

The decoration Europe associates with Imari is called Kinrande (金襴手, "gold brocade style") in Japan – named after silk fabrics interwoven with gold threads. Technically, it is produced in two firings. First, the formed and pre-fired body is painted with gosu in cobalt blue, coated with a transparent glaze, and fired at around 1,300 degrees Celsius; the blue sinks into the glaze during this process and gains its characteristic depth. Onto the finished, glass-hard surface, the overglaze colors are then applied, above all a warm iron red, along with the gold, which are fired in a second, significantly cooler firing. The combination of underglaze blue and colored overglaze decoration is called Somenishiki; only the addition of gold turns it into Kinrande. This style becomes identifiable in Arita toward the end of the 17th century, drawing on older Chinese gold brocade porcelains of the Ming period. The Metropolitan Museum of Art describes its 18th-century Imari pieces precisely in this layering: hard-paste porcelain with colored enamels over transparent glaze and gilding.

Ko-Imari, the "old Imari" of collectors

In Japan, Ko-Imari (古伊万里, "old Imari") refers to historical porcelain of the Edo period from the Hizen region, in the narrower sense the export ware of the 17th and 18th centuries. The term is a collector's category and not an indication of origin: it distinguishes the old pieces from later production, but says nothing about the individual workshop, since the kilns of the Hizen region as a rule did not sign their export ware – which is why the Metropolitan Museum of Art, too, lists its Imari holdings without workshop names, solely under the collective designation "Hizen ware; Imari type." All the more important for dating are large, closed holdings. The Kyūshū Ceramic Museum in Arita preserves, with the Shibata Collection, a group of 10,311 objects from the 17th to 19th centuries, of which around a thousand pieces are shown on a yearly rotating basis – one of the most important bodies of material for the classification of Ko-Imari altogether. On the European market, the term is today often encountered in a more liberal usage than in Japanese specialist literature; there it usually only indicates that a piece is kept in the old export decor.

Porcelain Fever at Europe's Royal Courts

Hardly anyone embodies the European enthusiasm for porcelain as vividly as Augustus the Strong, Elector of Saxony and King of Poland. In 1717 he acquired the Dutch Palace in Dresden and had it converted into a porcelain palace; since 1732 it has borne the name Japanese Palace. Entire suites of rooms were to be lined there with East Asian and Meissen porcelain. His collection originally comprised more than 29,000 East Asian porcelains, of which around 8,000 survive to this day in the Dresden Porcelain Collection; the inventory books of 1721 and 1779 document the holdings. Japanese ware from Arita – Imari decoration as well as the more restrained Kakiemon style – shaped the appearance of this collection to a considerable degree. For the collecting fervor of those years, the contemporary term "porcelain sickness" has been handed down – referring to the condition in which a prince was no longer satisfied with a single vase but demanded entire wall surfaces covered in it. Porcelain cabinets also arose at other courts during this period, in which East Asian pieces were arranged closely together, tier upon tier, on consoles.

Meissen, Delft, and Chantilly Respond to Imari

The success of Japanese porcelain did not remain without consequence for European production. In Delft, where the local soil yielded no material for true porcelain, the model was transferred onto tin-glazed faience – softer and cheaper, yet strikingly close in color impression. In Meissen, where the hard-paste porcelain firing succeeded around 1708 to 1710 as the first European manufactory to do so, Augustus the Strong had pieces from his East Asian collection copied: the head of painting Johann Gregorius Höroldt, recruited in 1720, and his workshop created exact copies of Japanese and Chinese models in the 1720s, among other things for the furnishing of the Japanese Palace. In France, Chantilly took its orientation chiefly from the finer Kakiemon decoration, while English manufactories developed their own Imari patterns, some of which are still produced today. The path of the motifs thus ran through three stations: from Chinese models to Arita, from there into the European palaces, and finally into the pattern books of the European manufactories.

Chinese Imari and the End of Export

As soon as the kilns of Jingdezhen were operating again, they copied the successful Japanese decoration. In the art trade these pieces are known as "Chinese Imari"; they achieved their widest distribution roughly between 1715 and 1735. They are generally more finely potted, thinner, and more evenly glazed – and they were considerably cheaper. For Japan, this meant the end of the great business: production in Hizen was more labor-intensive, and the ware could not be sustained at a competitive price. Export to Europe declined sharply until about 1740; individual shipments by the Company are still documented as late as the 1750s, after which trade ceased entirely. The kilns around Arita continued production, but now almost exclusively for the Japanese domestic market – for a good century, Imari porcelain remained in Europe merely a memory in princely display cabinets, with no fresh supply arriving from Kyūshū.

The Second Flowering in the Meiji Period

It was only the opening of Japan that brought the export trade back. In 1873 the Meiji government participated officially in a world's fair for the first time, in Vienna, and the European enthusiasm for Japanese art, Japonisme, gave porcelain from Hizen a second audience. In Arita, companies were founded specifically for the world market: in 1875 the Kōransha, in 1894 the company known today as Fukagawa Seiji, which was awarded a prize at the 1900 Paris World's Fair and from 1910 held the title of purveyor to the Japanese imperial household. The pieces of these decades are often technically more brilliant than the old export ware, but their precision also makes them feel cooler. A good portion of what is offered today as Imari comes from this second wave – anyone who wants to buy Japanese ceramics will almost inevitably encounter works from this period in the trade, considerably more often, in any case, than genuine export ware from the Edo period.

What "Imari" Means Today and What to Look For

In Japan, the name is now used more narrowly: there, Imari-yaki refers primarily to porcelain actually fired within the city area of Imari, such as in the kiln village of Ōkawachiyama, while ware from Arita is designated Arita-yaki; as a traditional craft, both are jointly listed as Imari-Arita-yaki. In European usage, by contrast, Imari remains primarily a decoration name. Anyone holding a piece is best advised to look closely at the brushwork: slightly uneven brushstrokes, the visible depth of the underglaze blue, and the minimally raised overglaze red, which can be felt with a fingernail. On the reverse of older plates, three to five small unglazed dots are often found, traces of the kiln spurs used during firing; these are considered an indication of Japanese manufacture, not proof.

At densho.de you will find handcrafted Japanese porcelain and ceramics pieces in which this triad of white ground, colorful painting, and gold accent still resonates today – each piece individually sourced from Japan. Whether as everyday tea ware or as a Japanese work of art given as a gift: hold such a piece up to the light and turn it slowly, and you will see how many hands have worked on it.

Sources and Literature

The Metropolitan Museum of Art: Plate with a vase of flowers, Acc.-Nr. 1995.268.37, metmuseum.org.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art: Bottle with flowers of the four seasons, Acc.-Nr. 1995.268.69, metmuseum.org.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art: Plate with Japanese court woman and birds, Acc.-Nr. 1995.268.139, metmuseum.org.

Nicole Coolidge Rousmaniere: Vessels of Influence. China and the Birth of Porcelain in Medieval and Early Modern Japan. Bristol Classical Press, London 2012.