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.

Ozeki was a Meiji-era firm that commissioned inlaid metalwork and enamels. A Bonhams catalogue records that the metalworker Yamada Motonobu (1847–97) received commissioned work from the Ozeki, and it attributes a pair of silver-inlaid vases to him, “probably for the Ozeki company”.¹

We have not yet found a museum or scholarly source for the firm’s location, founders or dates. This entry stays short until we do.

At auction 落札作品

Our auction-records database holds 1 public result for this maker, at Christie’s, from 2016 to 2016. The highest is a mixed-metal-inlaid silver vase, Christie's, AN INQUIRING MIND: AMERICAN COLLECTING OF JAPANESE AND KOREAN ART, 2016-04-15, lot 83, at US$62,500. These are public historical results, not valuations.

Christie’s catalogued a mixed-metal-inlaid silver vase sold in 2016 as signed Shigenobu and Shigenobu sen (carved by Onosawa Shigenobu) and sealed Ozeki sei (made by Ozeki). The house lists two shibuichi panels inlaid in gold, silver, shakudō and shibuichi with carp under wisteria. The marks thus separate the carver from the firm that made and sold the piece.¹

The same lot is recorded as published in the Yokohama Museum of Art catalogue DAI KAI-KO: The Art of the Period of Opening the Port of Yokohama (2009, no. 108) and in Murata Masayuki, ed., Bakumatsu Meiji no kinkō, Rokushō 32 (Kyoto, 2007, p. 76), and as exhibited at Yokohama from 19 September to 23 November 2009.¹

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.