Biography

Open, citable sources for this maker are limited. The section “The Taizan line” below adds the family history published by Edward S. Morse.

Taizan Yohei IX (1856–1922), whose family name was Takahashi, was the ninth and last head of the Taizan line of Awata potters in Kyoto. English Wikipedia lists him among the leading Satsuma makers of the Meiji and Taishō periods.¹²

Citing Gisela Jahn, satsuma-database.com says he was a younger brother of Kiyomizu Rokubei IV and was adopted into the Taizan family after the death of Taizan VII in 1875. It also says he turned the family pottery into a large Satsuma factory exporting to America, that the kiln appears to have closed around 1894, and that he later decorated blanks from Kinkōzan and others. A Kinkōzan family source records that Kinkōzan VI and Taizan VIII visited foreign merchant houses in Kobe in 1872.²³

His large vase with birds and flowers, in the Tokyo National Museum, came as a gift from the delegate office for the Chicago exposition of 1893. He does not appear on the list of Imperial Household Artists.⁴

The Taizan line 帯山家

The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, published an account of the family in Edward S. Morse’s catalogue of his Japanese pottery collection. It names the first generation as Takahashi Tokurō, who came from Ōmi and built a kiln at Awata in 1673. The second generation was called Yohei, and the name was kept by all later heads. According to Morse, the second head made only tea utensils, the third tea and wine utensils, the fourth (1789–92) first used a dark blue glaze, the fifth (1804–17) made blue pottery vases for the Imperial household, and the sixth (1830–38) introduced a regular style of painted decoration and was a friend of the painters Keibun and Toyohiko.¹

Morse took this from the Japanese work he calls Tōki Shōshi, which, he says, also mentions the seventh, eighth and ninth generations. He adds that, according to Ninagawa, the mark Taizan was first used in 1760, and that the many marks seen on Taizan wares could not be assigned to particular generations.¹ That caution applies to the auction pieces below.

Works with the Taizan mark

A baluster vase sold at Bonhams in New York in 2022, 25.4 cm high, is painted in enamels and gilt on a crackled glaze with women and children on a seashore under pines and two salt maidens carrying buckets, framed by dragons among clouds. It has an impressed Taizan signature and sold for US$1,530.² Bonhams offered in Edinburgh in 2014 a tall double-gourd vase signed Taizan, covered in a bright red glaze with a songbird on prunus.³ A pair of vases offered in London in 2021, painted with quail and butterflies, is signed Dai Nippon Taizan sei with an impressed Taizan mark.⁴ The Metropolitan Museum of Art holds a porcelain moon flask with small birds that it attributes to Taizan Yohei IX and dates to the late nineteenth or early twentieth century.⁵