Jar

Freer bought this late Ming or early Qing dynasty jar from the New York branch of Yamanaka and Company, where he was a regular customer. At the time, Freer believed that it was an Edo-period piece of Imari ware from Japan. Describing it in his notes as "extraordinary," he placed it between two Satsuma ware bottles, each decorated with a landscape design in subtle shades of blue. He may have discerned a chromatic relationship between those two vessels and this rough porcelain jar, with its cobalt decoration of floral vine scrolls. The jar's rim formation shows that it was made in imitation of Chinese pewter containers for storing green leaf tea and fitted with a flat inner lid and cylindrical outer lid that would have just covered the unglazed area of the neck. By the time Freer acquired the jar, however, the lost double lid had been replaced with a carved wooden cover of the sort used on Chinese ginger jars displayed in Western parlors and dining rooms at the turn of the century.