Henry Walters bought this six-lobed foliate bowl at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St Louis in 1904, one of the international fairs at which Meizan exhibited. Its exterior is covered with an intricate pattern of hundreds of women engaged in traditional arts, crafts and pastimes, each figure picked out in fired overglaze enamels. Around the base runs a ring of panels filled with flowers. The museum identifies some twenty species among them, including peonies, hydrangea, wisteria, morning glories, lilies and several kinds of camellia. Inside, a band of wisteria circles the rim, its blossoms hanging down into the bowl.
The museum also notes how such work was produced. The studio bought bisque-fired stoneware blanks from the Chin Jukan kiln in Kagoshima and the Kinkozan kiln in Kyoto, then transferred designs to them from its own pattern books. The bowl stands 19 centimetres high and came to the museum with Walters’s bequest in 1931.