Biography

Miyagawa Kōzan I was born Miyagawa Toranosuke in 1842 into a Kyoto potting family. His father, Makuzu Chōzō, had studied with Aoki Mokubei. He took over the family business in 1860, at the age of eighteen, and at first made tea utensils. In 1867 he accepted an invitation from Igi Tadazumi to work at the Igi family kiln at Mushiage, near Bizen, where he made blue-and-white wares for two years.¹

In 1870 he set up a workshop in Yokohama, which had recently opened as a treaty port, at the invitation of a Tokyo merchant interested in exporting Satsuma ware. The kiln was called Ōta. After a serious fire in 1876 he rebuilt it at his own expense and went on to sell his work on his own account.¹

His early work is known for takaukibori: modelled figures of birds, animals, crabs and plants applied in very high relief. In the 1890s he developed decoration using several underglaze colours, and from 1900 to 1910 his shapes and decoration changed again under Western influence. He showed at Philadelphia in 1876 and won a gold medal for transmutation (yōhen) glazes at Paris in 1889. The workshop received an honorary gold medal at Chicago in 1893, and at Paris in 1900 he was the only Japanese ceramic exhibitor to win a grand prix. From 1876 to 1913 he won prizes at 51 exhibitions.¹

He was appointed an Imperial Household Artist on 30 June 1896. In 1911 the Imperial family commissioned a vase from him as a gift for the King of the Belgians. His successor was his adopted son Hannosuke (Kōzan II). The Yokohama works were destroyed by bombing in 1945.²¹

At auction 落札作品

Our auction-records database holds 20 public results for this maker, at Bonhams and Christie’s, from 2011 to 2026. The highest is a Large Porcelain Vase, Bonhams, Fine Japanese & Korean Art, 2026-09-16, lot 1076, at US$35,840. These are public historical results, not valuations.

A Bonhams essay of 2024 records that Kōzan left the family workshop in Kyoto in the summer of 1871 for the newly opened port of Yokohama, where he made export wares in the Satsuma style at large scale and in elaborate high relief.¹

The essay says he won prizes at Vienna (1873) and Philadelphia (1876) and at the first National Industrial Exhibition of 1877, where a piece of this type was touched by the Meiji Emperor and later bought for the Imperial collection. It compares the vases with one acquired by the South Kensington Museum (now the V&A) in 1879, inv. 308-1879.¹

Another Bonhams essay characterises his later large porcelains as sites for “high-relief decoration, underglaze painting, newly developed glaze effects, and variations on imperial Chinese porcelain designs”. We quote it as the cataloguer’s assessment.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.