Biography

Yabu Meizan, born Yabu Masashichi, was born on 20 January 1853 at Nagahori, Osaka. He was the son of the painter Yabu Chōsui and the grandson of the scholar Yabu Kakudō. In 1880 he went to Tokyo to study pottery painting. In October of that year he opened a workshop for the overglaze decoration of Satsuma ware at Nakanoshima, Osaka, moving to Dōjima from about 1888.²¹

The studio did not fire its own wares. It bought undecorated blanks, from the Awata kilns of Kyoto and later from Chin Jukan in Kagoshima and from Kinkōzan. Designs were engraved on copper plates and printed on paper, and the printed sheets were used to transfer the underdrawing onto each piece before decorators painted it. Visiting in 1894–95, Charles Parsons recorded “17 men and boys at work, all decorating”.¹²

From 1885 his work was sold in the United States. He exhibited widely: at the fourteenth Kyoto Exhibition of 1885 (bronze medal), at Chicago in 1893, at Paris in 1900, at St Louis in 1904, where he won a gold medal and served as secretary of the Japan Exhibits Association, at Portland in 1905, at London in 1910, and at San Francisco in 1915. He headed the Osaka Art Society. YabuMeizan.com records that Henry Walters bought at St Louis the bowl now in the Walters Art Museum, illustrated here.²¹

His subjects moved from Chinese and Buddhist themes towards Japanese ones in the 1890s, and some designs draw on prints by Hiroshige. Late in his career he covered whole vessels in a single motif. Another workshop used his name and imitated his style. The business declined during the First World War and closed in 1926, when his adopted son Yabu Tsuneo took over the Meizan name. Meizan died on 2 May 1934. He does not appear on the list of Imperial Household Artists.²³

At auction 落札作品

Our auction-records database holds 17 public results for this maker, at Bonhams, from 2009 to 2021. The highest is a large and highly important Satsuma presentation vase, Bonhams, Fine Japanese Art, 2017-09-13, lot 1286, at US$205,500. These are public historical results, not valuations.

Bonhams’ cataloguers describe Yabu Meizan as “the most successful of all manufacturers of Satsuma ware”, opening his Osaka workshop in 1880 and concentrating on the export market, above all the United States, from 1888.¹

The same essay records that through the first decade of the twentieth century he focused on the international expositions, Paris (1900), St Louis (1904) and London (1910), visiting each and taking an organisational role.¹

A small covered jar sold in London in 2014 had been listed by the collector Michael Tomkinson in his 1898 catalogue as “a beautiful example of Meizan’s work in modern Satsuma faïence”; the entry was reproduced in the Khalili Collection volume on earthenware (1995). The Bonhams footnote observes that snow scenes are not common in Satsuma ware.²

Several lot essays compare Meizan pieces with examples in the Khalili Collection, published by Oliver Impey, Malcolm Fairley and others in 1995 (for example cat. nos. 57, 66 and 95), which is the standard printed reference for his workshop.³

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.