Exhibition Outlines

Special Exhibition No.6 Imperial Feasts -Modern Table Art- -A Special Exhibition in Commemoration of the 10th Anniversary of the Enthronement of His Majesty the Emperor- (2000/1/15 - 2000/2/6)

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Imperial Feasts

In the sixth and concluding part of the current series of special exhibitions celebrating the 10th anniversary of the enthronement of His Majesty the Emperor, we are very glad to present a new show entitled “Imperial Feasts-Modern Table Art”.

A followup to one of the preceding exhibitions- “Imperial Feasts-Beauty of Traditions”, the present exhibition purports to show some of the Western-style dinnerware truly worthy of the name of table art objects. The porcelain, ceramic, glass and silver items have been selected, from out of the Imperial Cuisine Department’s plentiful inventories, for the sheer beauty of their shapes and decorations.

A vast majority of the dinnerware, with the exception of a limited number of specimens imported from England in the early Meiji Period, is of Japanese manufacture. Some of them are replicas of British and French models, while others are purely of Japanese design and shapes. Among them are the rare specimens of Kanzan Denshichi, the pioneering domestic manufacturer of Western-style dinnerware, a variety of Porcelain and ceramic tableware produced by Seiji Gaisha Of Arita, Kyushu in the late 1870s and the early 1880s, and some precious examples of cutglass plates showing the Edo-Kiriko cutglass traditions. Few will deny that studies of history not only on Western-style dinnerware production in Japan but also on modern Japanese industrial crafts as a whole will be incomplete without touching upon many of the Products now on display. A variety of silverware also merits close attention as they showcase unique design modifications done by the Imperial Household on the models of Victorian England.

We hope that the present exhibition, by showing a wide variety of Western-style dinnerware in the Imperial Household at a single site, will Provide an opportunity for the students of the field to carefully rescrutinize the true value of such ware as industrial craft products and, at the same time, to enable the general viewers to visualize for themselves what a modern Western-style dinner party in the royal household is like.