This deep charger takes up one of the studio’s showpiece designs of the 1880s and 1890s. An enormous elephant, painted in thickly applied enamels, wears an elaborate howdah and a caparison decorated with a dragon roundel and scrolling floral vines. Swarms of Chinese children crowd into the howdah, clamber over the animal’s back and play about its feet. The rim is densely banded with chrysanthemum heads between key-fret and dot-in-circle borders.
Bonhams noted a nearly identical charger in the Khalili Collection (S 4), and the Osaka Museum of History holds a related white-elephant dish. The underside is signed in gilt ‘Dai Nihon Meizan sei’, the longer form of the signature associated with the studio’s earlier years. Offered at Bonhams, Japanese and Korean Art, New York, on 21 September 2022, lot 710. It realised US$25,500 including buyer’s premium, against an estimate of US$10,000–US$15,000.