Biography

Short entry. Open, citable sources for this maker are limited, so we have published only what we can source. It will be extended as research continues.

Hattori Tadasaburō was a Nagoya cloisonné artist. With Kawade Shibatarō he developed the moriage, or “piling up”, technique, in which layers of enamel build a three-dimensional effect. His work is in the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Khalili Collection.¹

The V&A holds a pair of Nagoya vases of about 1900–10, marked Hattori, with low-relief moriage egrets. A Bonhams catalogue gives his death as 1939 and dates a large moriage vase by him to the Taishō era, about 1912–20. He does not appear on the list of Imperial Household Artists.²³⁴

At auction 落札作品

Our auction-records database holds 1 public result for this maker, at Bonhams, from 2018 to 2018. The highest is an exceptionally fine baluster moriage cloisonné-enamel vase, Bonhams, Fine Japanese Art, 2018-05-17, lot 515, at £100,000 (about US$135,150 at the sale-date rate). These are public historical results, not valuations.

Bonhams catalogues a baluster vase sold in 2018 as by Hattori Tadasaburō and worked in moriage (raised) cloisonné with fruiting branches.¹

Christie’s sold in 2007 a vase signed Hattori Kin sei, worked in gold wire and moriage on a celadon ground with two imperial mon, and catalogued it as an imperial presentation piece. We record the signature as catalogued and do not assume that it names the same hand.²

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.