Seto ware flask

This flask was made by a potter working at the Seto kilns, near the modern city of Nagoya. The kilns began making glazed stoneware ceramics in the twelfth century and are still active today as a major center of ceramic production. Wares made between the twelfth and early sixteenth centuries are known as Old Seto.

The shape of this flask, with its high shoulders, tapering walls, and narrow base, belongs to the middle period of the five phases of Old Seto chronology as archaeologists currently construe it. The positioning of the three incised bands, with the lowest placed quite far down on the body, also agrees with fourteenth-century types. On the interior wall, clear traces of the wide clay coils from which the flask was built show that the coils were not well consolidated in the construction process. Clinging to the interior wall are flecks of what appears to be cinnabar red lacquer, which would have been applied to prevent leaking.

With its narrow opening, this type of flask was used in a secular context to serve distilled rice wine or sake. Many such flasks have been handed down in Buddhist temples, where they served as altar vases, and in Shinto shrines, where they contained offertory sake. This flask, however, would seem to have been "collected" as an antique at some point. One owner stained the flask with Chinese ink to emphasize the crackle pattern in the glaze. The same owner probably ordered a specialist to repair the chipped rim with black lacquer imbedded with gold-leaf flakes of identical scale as the crackle.