Biography

Shōami Katsuyoshi was born on 28 April 1832 at Tsuyama, the third son of Nakagawa Gōemon Katsutsugu, a metal carver to the Tsuyama domain. He learned metal carving from his father. At eighteen he was adopted into the Shōami family, carvers to the Okayama domain, and became its ninth head. He continued to receive designs and instruction by letter from his elder brother and from Gotō Ichijō.¹

The abolition of the domains, and then the 1876 edict banning the wearing of swords, ended his work on sword fittings. He turned to vases, incense burners, sculpture and tea wares. In 1878 he set up an export venture with more than thirty craftsmen. He stopped it after crude imitations by dishonest dealers appeared, and from then on he concentrated on a small workshop.¹

He exhibited widely. His plaque with a bulbul in snowy nandina, dated 1892, won a bronze medal (third class) at Chicago in 1893, according to Japanese Wikipedia. It was given to the Tokyo National Museum by the Japanese Delegate’s Office for the exposition. In 1899 he moved to Kyoto, where Japanese Wikipedia says much of his most admired work was made. He died there in December 1908.¹²

He does not appear on the list of Imperial Household Artists. About 150 works are recorded, and many went abroad. The Khalili Collection includes an elephant incense burner by him.⁴¹³

Japanese Wikipedia records that from 1878 he worked for three years on a large screen ordered from England, with zodiac designs by Kanō Natsuo and Unno Shōmin and woodwork by Henmi Tōyō; the screen is now in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. A pair of vases with the wind and thunder gods, now in the Hayashibara Museum of Art, won a third prize at the fifth National Industrial Exhibition of 1903. The article also records that he worked almost without a break, taking only New Year and the Aoi Festival as holidays.¹

At auction 落札作品

Our auction-records database holds 4 public results for this maker, at Bonhams and Christie’s, from 2016 to 2019. The highest is a large soft-metal-inlaid silver incense burner, Christie's, AN INQUIRING MIND: AMERICAN COLLECTING OF JAPANESE AND KOREAN ART, 2016-04-15, lot 73, at US$389,000. These are public historical results, not valuations.

Bonhams’ 2019 essay records that Katsuyoshi was born in Mimasaka Province, trained under his father Nakagawa Katsutsugu, was adopted at 18 into a local branch of the Shōami and later worked for the Ikeda family in Bizen.¹

After the Haitōrei edict of 1876 removed his patrons among sword-wearers, the essay says, he turned to tea utensils, flower vases and incense burners, exhibited widely and won “no fewer than 28 awards”. It names works in the Khalili Collection (a silver elephant incense burner), the Kiyomizu Sannenzaka Museum (a large group) and the British Museum (an iron hanging vase, 1969,0210.1).¹

Facts in this section are as stated by the auction houses in their lot essays, footnoted below. Where they differ from other sources we say so.