Tea bowl

Freer purchased this Japanese tea bowl from the New York branch of Yamanaka and Company, whose Fifth Avenue shop was an important source of Japanese and Chinese art for many American collectors at the turn of the century. This piece was one of more than twenty-five tea bowls that Freer acquired from Yamanaka in 1897. He displayed several of them in the Peacock Room in Detroit, where he organized them alongside Whistler's painting La Princesse du pays de la porcelaine.