This tea service was made for sencha, the steeped green tea that was fashionable among Japan’s literati in the nineteenth century, and the British Museum holds it as a set. The museum records a teapot with its lid, a water-jug with its storage box, and five small tea-bowls. Each piece has a crackled cream glaze and is painted in overglaze enamels and gold with maple. On the base of each is the workshop name in overglaze gold.
The museum’s record is unusually explicit about how the service was made. It catalogues the stoneware body as produced in Kagoshima, the historic home of Satsuma ware, and the decoration as carried out in Osaka. This neatly illustrates the studio’s practice of buying in finished blanks and painting them in its own workshop. The service is dated 1880–1908. It was given by David and Anne Hyatt King through the Art Fund, and the teapot is currently recorded as on display in the museum’s Japanese galleries, Room 93.