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IDENTIFICATION OF THIS CUP NEEDED

by Andrew

Hello Peter,
Firstly Easter greetings to you & yours,and also to all the other members.

I have 2 cups that are similar but not identical.
Both seem to have an unusual crimp mark on the rim.
Material looks like hard paste, semi transparent porcelain, but dirtier & without any ring tone.
Also the paste has a very slight off greyish hue.
The paste surface is quite irregular to the touch & not as what one would find when handling finer quality porcelain.
The cups appear to be handmade with appealing wide shallow bowls with attached bamboo shape styled handles.
Cups are 50 mm.s high & about 100 mm.s in bowl diameter.

Underglaze blue decoration around the rim with the rest of the enamel colours being overpainted.
The red pencilling appears to be transfer print, but when I compared the 2 cups, although the theme is meant to be the same, there are subtle irregularities in the style, shape & size of the red lines, including total omission of some figures which should be in that position, but have been replaced with something else completely.They look like they could have been actually hand painted with an overglaze red enamel & not been printed.

I have no idea as to whether they are Chinese, Japanese or even continental English.
No identifying marks on the cups.

Would love some help on this one.

PS: humble collector seeking knowledge & enlightenment.

sincerely, Andrew.

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Apr 21, 2011
 cup
by: peter

Hi Andrew,
Looks pretty new, probably not antique. The cup has a Japanese motif. As such, for me there are only two possibilies, it was made in Japan or it is a modern copy of Japanese porcelain, possibly made in China. They would be copying anything if it sells...

As to the fault at the rim,it looks like a firing fault to me. If it were only the two white spots on the outside I would assume that another item was touching this one in the kiln, but the way as it looks inside and outside, it could well be that something fell on it during the firing. In the heat inside the kiln an item might have become unstable and leaned or fallen upon the rim of the cup. I am just surprised that you found something like this.
With the quality consciousness the Japanese have, I don't think they would let something with such a production fault leave the factory. This, and the fact that whole painting looks like a humble jumble of colors could mean that it was not made in Japan, after all, despite the Japanese motif.

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