Akahada Ware Japanese Pottery Bowls and Cups 6 Piece Set Marked Kiri Wood Box

A Japanese Akahada ware set of six pieces: three larger bowls with softly pinched rims and ribbed lower walls, and three small cups. All are glazed in a creamy off white with fine iron speckling breaking through, thinning to a warm buff at the rims and at the unglazed foot rings, with a spiral tool mark left in the well of each bowl. One base is impressed with the characters for Akahada yama. The set comes in a paulownia wood box with tissue. Akahada ware is made at the foot of Mount Akahada in Nara Prefecture and is counted among the Enshu Nanagama, the seven kilns associated with the tea master Kobori Enshu in the seventeenth century. Enshu's taste ran to restraint over display, and the pieces show it: the glaze is allowed to run thin at the edges so the clay reads through, the rims are pushed slightly out of round by hand rather than trued, and the spiral left by the potter's rib is kept rather than smoothed away. The local clay is iron bearing, which is where the speckling comes from, and the name Akahada, meaning red skin, refers to that clay rather than to the finished glaze.