Cambridge Blue and White
John Coates is a professor of mathematics with a passion for early Japanese ceramics. He talks to Apollo about the pleasures of identifying rare pieces and what they tell us about the porcelain trade
Mathematician John Coates takes Susan Moore on a tour of his early Japanese ceramics
John Coates is the Emeritus Sadleirian Professor of Pure Mathematics at the University of Cambridge. While the connection between mathematics and his passion for early Japanese porcelain may not be obvious, there is, he assures me, some kind of parallel between the two. ‘The perfection of the painting of porcelains from the Arita kilns, especially the early blue-and-white, is analogous to a beautiful mathematic paper in which everything has to fit perfectly together,’ he says with a gentle smile, ensconced in a small study full of the hundreds of pieces he has collected over the last three decades.
Mathematics has, in fact, played a critical role both in inspiring this collection and guiding its evolution – and uncovering evidence for an unexpected and still unexplained early trade route. This saw Japanese porcelains exported to British shores, possibly via the intermediary of the Chinese junk trade, in the second half of the 17th century, even though trade from Japan was largely controlled by the Dutch East India Company. Here are pieces that survive nowhere else in Europe, and some that can be identified only through excavated sherds in Japan.
Neither mathematics nor works of art were part of a childhood spent on the family farm in Possum Brush in the Manning Valley, New South Wales, deep in the then totally unspoilt Australian bush – ‘a tremendous place for a boy’, he remembers. Coates grew up listening to Yeats being read aloud – the cadence of his voice still bears witness to that Irish-Australian heritage – but without any interest in mathematics. ‘I ended up as a number theorist purely by chance. Robert Menzies, the only Australian prime minister who was interested in universities, decreed that the Australian National University, which until then had been purely a research institution, should take undergraduates, and gave them money for scholarships. I was given one the year they were introduced.’ He had intended to take a degree in physics ‘but the physics lectures were terrible and the maths lectures quite good’. That led him to the elderly refugee Kurt Mahler, who introduced Coates to the ‘strange and beautiful structures’ of German mathematics: ‘It was seductive.’
The trajectory of Coates’s career took him from Possum Brush and Canberra to Cambridge, the Université de Paris XI, Harvard, Stanford and the École Normal Supérieure, before he was offered one of the ancient established university chairs back in Cambridge. ‘Have you read The Tale of Genji?’ he asks. ‘Like him, I was also exiled.’
It was mathematics that first took Coates to Japan in 1976 – he was working on the algebraic number theory of Kenkichi Iwasawa, probably the greatest Japanese mathematician of the 20th century, and had been invited to a conference in Kyoto. ‘It was the peak of spring. I was carried away by the beauty of the mathematics, and completely swept off my feet by the exquisite antique porcelains and lacquers that filled the streets of shops near where we were staying,’ he remembers. When he returned to Paris, he began to look for Japanese porcelain. ‘The truth was that it was horribly expensive. There were the famous polychrome pieces from the Kakiemon kilns that filled European aristocratic collections, but not the very early pieces that fascinated me.’
After eight years in Paris, he was recalled to Cambridge and Emmanuel College in 1986. ‘At that point the maths department was in Mill Lane, and I used to walk past this antique shop that had just opened in Pembroke Street. To my amazement, the owner, Peter Crabbe, had some beautiful pieces of early Japanese porcelain which he bought at the Portobello market in London.’ Crabbe sourced a good deal of Coates’s collection, not only from Portobello but also from little regional auctions in East Anglia. The material was often not recognised for what it was: ‘The historically very interesting residue of the first wave of Japanese porcelain exports to the stately homes of Britain.’ Coates pauses to reflect on his good fortune. ‘The Japanese stock market had collapsed, the Japanese dealers were not buying, and the pieces were at a price that one could afford on a modest professorial salary. Many of these earlier pieces – and by that, I mean up to around 1720 – were so exquisitely hand-painted that even an amateur could see that they were remarkable. That was what originally fascinated me.’
One of his first acquisitions was an elaborately decorated piece of presentation Imari, a square plate decorated in overglaze red, green and gold enamels and made for the export market in the central kilns of Arita in 1690–1710. Such multicoloured porcelains were termed Imari ware in the West, their name deriving from the port of Imari from which Arita porcelains were shipped to Nagasaki where the Chinese and the Dutch East Indian Company had trading outposts. Displayed alongside it in Coates’s
rooms is a bowl of the same period also found in England but certainly made for the fastidious domestic Japanese market. The collection embraces both blue-and-white and polychrome wares made for both the domestic and export markets, but also figures and other rarities. Among these is a celadon-glazed rakan, an ascetic and enlightened disciple of Buddha (Fig. 5), and one of the earliest known porcelain figures made in Arita (a similar piece is in Erddig in Wales). Almost all of them found their way to these shores. Coates has always been fascinated by the fact that porcelain production was Japan’s first high-tech industry, and the collection grew to reflect its early history both in terms of production and trade.
In fact, the earliest pieces in the collection are manufactured from a stoneware, some of it porcelaneous, made in the Karatsu and Mino kilns by Korean potters. A handsome and very rare tokkuri, or sake bottle, made around 1615–20 is decorated with a fresh green copper-sulphate glaze, poured rather than painted, its iron-painted design of hanging persimmons (Fig. 4). Found by Coates on the English-Welsh borders, this tokkuri may well have been brought to the UK by the East India Company when it had a trading base on Hirado Island between 1613 and 1623.
Certainly, the Koreans introduced improved kiln technology, which enabled firing at high temperatures. One of the potters reputedly kidnapped by the Japanese forces is said to have made the fateful discovery of deposits of fine porcelain clay in Arita, and porcelains began to be produced in the 1610s. Among the earliest blue-andwhite Arita porcelains in the collection are two small plates in the Korean style from the Hyakken kiln, quite heavily potted and with a greyish body. They appear to have been painted by the same potter around 1630–40, and were found separately in East Anglia some 20 years apart. Coates also has pieces of the same period, the silver tops of which reveal they were exported to Vietnam.
A similar influx of expertise in the 1640s introduced more refined porcelain techniques and enamel glazes to Japan. This time it was provided by Chinese refugees fleeing the turmoil at the end of the Ming dynasty when many of the kilns at Jingdezhen were damaged. Probably the most renowned piece in the Coates Collection – and a Portobello coup – is the ewer made in Arita for the Islamic market some time during the 1650s (Fig. 3). It is the only known surviving piece matching a group of sherds discovered in a building site near Deshima Island in Nagasaki in 1996; a sherd with closely related painting was excavated at the Yanbeta kiln site in Arita in 2017 (and a later Arita jar with similar decoration also survives at Topkapi Palace in Istanbul). ‘This piece illustrates how perfectly the Japanese had mastered the Chinese fashion of making porcelain with this difficult underglaze blue decoration by as early as 1650,’ Coates says. It also supports evidence that from around 1647, Chinese vessels began exporting Japanese wares overseas after production in Jingdezhen had massively declined to fulfil the insatiable European demand for blue-and-white porcelains. Overseas trade was stopped completely by the new Qing dynasty government in 1656. Research on the archives of the British East India Company shows that Japanese wares were traded in Chinese ports by Chinese dealers who had acquired them in Nagasaki in the period 1699–1721, but earlier documentation is poor.
Another prized early find is a modern-looking monochrome blue tokkuri in the form of a double gourd, made in the Nishinobori kiln in the 1650s. Its strikingly effective decoration is made by simple incised lines which lend the bottle a sense of asymmetry, while the pooling of glaze alongside the incisions makes it pleasingly tactile (Fig. 1, 4th shelf from the top, far right). ‘I was really excited when I found that,’ Coates says. ‘It was one of my earliest acquisitions.’ There are similar pieces in the British Museum and the Kyushu Ceramic Museum in Arita. Another rarity is the tokkuri on the mantelpiece painted with a landscape and pagoda, exceptional for the fact that all its enamel colours – green, red and blue – are overglaze.
‘The archaeological work undertaken throughout Arita has been incredibly thorough,’ Coates continues. It has made the identification and dating of pieces remarkably precise. The scholar who presided over much of this field work was Professor Koji Ohashi, director of the Kyushu Ceramic Museum at the time. He came to play a key role in the evolution of this collection. It was during a sabbatical visit to New York around 2002 that Coates had first come upon a catalogue of the Shibata Collection, a comprehensive and unparalleled holding of some 10,311 pieces of Arita porcelain only recently donated to the Kyushu Ceramic Museum, and now registered as a Tangible Cultural Property. It became Coates’s touchstone for any piece he found that looked interesting.
During his next mathematical conference in Japan, in 2003, he asked his colleague at Keio University, Professor Masato Kurihara, if they might visit the Shibata Collection and perhaps meet some of its specialists. It so happened that one of the first pupils of Kenkichi Iwasawa had come from Arita, and Professor Eiichiro Fujisaki introduced him to Ohashi. ‘It was an incredible stroke of luck,’ Coates says. ‘Not only was he very interested in the pieces I had found – I had taken photographs with me – but he was incredibly generous. He offered to date any pieces I might find in the future, and also tell me whether they were of particular interest or rarity.’ Ohashi also provided him with photographs of sherds relating to his pieces.
This exchange, initially conducted by letter, led to Coates joining a museum group touring English countryhouse collections known to have groups of exceptionally high-quality blue-and-white Arita porcelains made during the second half of the 17th century, notably Burghley House and Sherborne Castle. Several pieces relating to these collections also belong to Coates.
The quality and subtlety of the painting in underglaze cobalt-blue on the best of these porcelains is remarkable, as is the frequently asymmetrical placing of the motif on the milk-white grounds. Two rectangular plates of modest scale combine asymmetrical forms and especially detailed and evocative landscapes with buildings set on a shore. Dated to between 1655 and the 1670s, they may well be early examples of presentation porcelains for a high official, and a similar piece is in the Shibata Collection. The Coates pieces came from a UK farmhouse sale. What is clear is that such pieces were originally intended for the Japanese domestic market. ‘Unlike the Chinese painters working at the Imperial kilns, the Japanese were given great artistic freedom,’ Coates explains. ‘I find Chinese painting so cold, so formulaic.’
He also points out that no more than 20 pieces were painted to the same design. This accounts for the rarity of certain Arita designs. A large blue-and-white plate decorated with pheasants in the 1660s or ’70s at the Kakiemon kiln, which became famous for developing distinctive polychrome enamelled wares, appears to be unique (Fig. 6). It may well have been a prototype for the numerous later polychromed versions that survive in British collections. This limited production makes the surviving groups of identical wares here all the more remarkable. There are eight plates with a border of beautifully painted and subtly-hued cobalt-blue sheaves made in the Nangawara-Kamanotsuji kiln in the 1680s or ’90s, for instance, which are otherwise known only through a sherd in Arita. They turned up in the West Country, via a fellow enthusiast whom Coates encountered in the early years of the internet, who also sourced pieces in America.
While the early blue-and-white porcelains are the real stars here, the collection also comprises impressive groups of polychrome wares, made for the domestic market and for export (Fig. 7). After the China trade resumed in 1684 after the reunification of the country, the market was flooded with blue-and-white wares from Jingdezhen and the demand from Arita was limited to its spectacular polychromes. ‘Japanese porcelain exported at this period was about four or five times more expensive than Chinese,’ Coates explains. ‘The artistic quality was so much higher.’
One of the distinctive features of Kakiemon production was its use of moulded shapes. Some take the form of a chrysanthemum. ‘Ohashi began to look at a group of polychromes which had a blue clove-shaped mark on their bases after he found a sherd of one in Arita about a decade or so ago. He alerted me to them,’ Coates says. ‘I already had a number of pieces with this mark, and began to look out for more.’ These wares are now believed to be a product of the Kakiemon kilns. Certainly, the combination of motifs selected for a group of bowls and a single related lid – brushwood and plum branches, presumably the work of the same painter – is often found in Kakiemon design. These date between around 1690 and the 1720s. No other pieces are known to exist in Europe, and very few in Japan, which suggests all were made for export and came to the UK. Some 31 clove-marked pieces are in this collection, and Coates has donated other examples to the Kyushu Ceramic Museum which match wares already in the museum’s collection.
‘It was a miracle that this material was here around me in the United Kingdom, and that I could afford to buy it,’ Coates marvels. ‘Also, after I met Professor Ohashi, I had an arm that no one else had – access to extraordinary expertise.’ At this point, he drops into the conversation that he has never bought a single piece at auction, and made only a few trips to Portobello himself. ‘I just didn’t have the time.’ As these photographs reveal, this mathematician happily made time to find order in chaos. o