Toujaku - Sometsuke Painted Square w/ Patina - 97mm

Hand carved from a block of porcelain comes this fabulous Sometsuke painted square pot from Toujaku. Practical small shohin size. There is a kiln / drying crack in the base. If you look carefully, it doesn't go through the pot, it's just on the outside, and in fact has been glazed over by Toujaku, so this is definitely a drying crack, and given the patina, has never been a problem.

On to the paintings! Sometsuke is a cobalt based paint that goes back to China, traditionally contaminated with traces of Manganese or Iron, which many artists (and I'm assuming Toujaku too) have copied to an extent to get an authentic look, and also to mellow out the brightness of Cobalt. There is a slight softness to the painting from the clear overglaze.
Each side of this pot has a different directionality to suit a tree of any style, and each side blends into the adjoining ones seamlessly.
The scene is of a lake with two adjoining shores - so there are two corners with tall vegetation in the near ground and the lake spans between them. The fourth side neatly joins the two shores, there's a really good sense of depth and distances stretching out. I'm guessing this is either Lake Biwa or Osaka Bay, because that's where Toujaku lived, and presumably based on a scroll or woodcut print. 

Porcelain takes a while to patinate, so my guesstimation on age is 40-50 years.