Biography

Namikawa Yasuyuki was born in 1845 into a family whose original name was Takaoka, and he served as a samurai before taking up cloisonné around 1868. From 1871 to 1874 he worked for the Kyoto Cloisonné Company, and he later set up his own workshop in Kyoto. He sometimes signed his work Kyoto Namikawa.¹

His workshop was also a place visitors came to see. He began the tour in his garden, as an introduction to Japanese taste, and then showed each stage of production, including a sequence of fourteen polishing stones of graded roughness. Rudyard Kipling was among those who visited.¹

His early work used geometric motifs and stylised plants. Over his career it became more pictorial, often showing Kyoto landmarks, and he worked on larger and more varied vessels. With Gottfried Wagener, a German scientist engaged by the Meiji government, he developed a semi-transparent mirror-black enamel that became a hallmark of the workshop. By 1893 he had learned to hide the background wires and so create unbroken fields of enamel. The Tokyo National Museum describes his black glazes as celebrated; one example in its collection is a pair of vases of 1892.¹⁴

From 1875 to 1915 he won prizes at 51 exhibitions, including world’s fairs and Japan’s National Industrial Exhibitions. In 1881 a copper vase took a second prize at the National Industrial Exhibition. At the fourth exhibition, in 1895, he won first prize, and the judges praised his fine wirework and a surface free of pitting or bubbles. He won a gold prize at St Louis in 1904. His Vase with Birds and Flowers of the Four Seasons of 1899 won a gold prize at the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1900. It is in the Museum of the Imperial Collections and was designated an Important Cultural Property in 2025.¹

He was appointed an Imperial Household Artist on 30 June 1896, in the same group as Namikawa Sōsuke. They were the only two cloisonné artists ever appointed. After the Meiji era, foreign demand fell away. Namikawa retired in 1919, and the workshop closed in 1923.³¹

At auction 落札作品

Our auction-records database holds 14 public results for this maker, at Bonhams and Christie’s, from 2005 to 2024. The highest is a Fine and Rare Cloisonné Vessel and Cover in the form of a Temple Bell, Christie's, Masterful Exuberance, Artistic Craftsmanship of Imperial Japan: The Property of a Lady, 2012-05-18, lot 244, at £217,250 (about US$343,646 at the sale-date rate). These are public historical results, not valuations.

A Bonhams lot essay of 2019 cites a nearly identical jar in the Kiyomizu Sannenzaka Museum, Kyoto, published in the 2017 exhibition catalogue Namikawa Yasuyuki and Japanese Cloisonné: The Allure of Meiji Cloisonné, The Aesthetic of Translucent Black (Mainichi Shinbunsha), cat. no. 40.¹

Catalogue descriptions of the workshop’s vases repeatedly record polychrome enamels worked in silver wire on a black ground, the combination that the Tokyo National Museum and the biography above associate with Namikawa’s translucent black.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.