Sake bottle

This was one of Freer's earliest Asian ceramics purchases. He acquired it in 1893 from Tozo Takayanagi and regarded it as "very fine." His colleague Edward Sylvester Morse, the Boston scholar and collector, disagreed, however: In 1921 he dismissed it as a modern piece and "not worth a damn." In the Peacock Room in Detroit, the bottle was displayed with other dark, glossy ceramics with rich, varied surfaces.