was a Japanese potter of the

Edo period The or is the period between 1603 and 1867 in the history of Japan, when Japan was under the rule of the Tokugawa shogunate and the country's 300 regional ''daimyo''. Emerging from the chaos of the Sengoku period, the Edo period was character ...

. Eisen was born in

Kyoto Kyoto (; Japanese: , ''Kyōto'' ), officially , is the capital city of Kyoto Prefecture in Japan. Located in the Kansai region on the island of Honshu, Kyoto forms a part of the Keihanshin metropolitan area along with Osaka and Kobe. , the ...

, evidently the grandson of Chinese immigrants, and adopted into the Okuda family of pawnbrokers. Although he inherited the family business, at age 35 he devoted his attention to amateur pottery, and by the 1780s he was producing copies of late Ming-period enamelled

porcelain Porcelain () is a ceramic material made by heating substances, generally including materials such as kaolinite, in a kiln to temperatures between . The strength and translucence of porcelain, relative to other types of pottery, arises main ...

. He also made ''

kochi Kochi (), also known as Cochin ( ) ( the official name until 1996) is a major port city on the Malabar Coast of India bordering the Laccadive Sea, which is a part of the Arabian Sea. It is part of the district of Ernakulam in the state of ...

'' (polychrome ware), '' sometsuke'' (underglaze cobalt or blue-and-white) and ''

ko akae A KO is a knockout in various sports, such as boxing and martial arts. K.O., Ko or Kō may also refer to: Arts and entertainment Music * KO (musician), Canadian musician who plays a fusion of hip hop and folk music * ''K.O.'' (album), a 2021 ...

'' (old red ware) as utensils for the

tea ceremony An East Asian tea ceremony, or ''Chádào'' (), or ''Dado'' ( ko, 다도 (茶道)), is a ceremonially ritualized form of making tea (茶 ''cha'') practiced in East Asia by the Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans. The tea ceremony (), literally transl ...

and for drinking ''

sencha is a type of Japanese ''ryokucha'' (, green tea) which is prepared by infusing the processed whole tea leaves in hot water. This is as opposed to matcha (), powdered Japanese green tea, where the green tea powder is mixed with hot water and th ...

'' (green tea). His disciples included Aoki Mokubei, Kinkodo Kamesuke (1764-1837), and Nin'ami Dohachi (1783-1855).

References

* Patricia Jane Graham, ''Tea of the Sages: The Art of Sencha'', University of Hawaii Press, 1998.
Oxford Index entry

Answers.com entry

{{Authority control Japanese potters 1753 births 1811 deaths