Platter with fishnet design

The striking, curvilinear design of this large platter is inspired by the most mundane of daily tools: a fishnet. Potters in the Arita region of far southwestern Japan (where Imari pottery was produced beginning around 1615) painted fishnet designs, some relatively naturalistically and others, like this one, highly stylized, on a wide range of porcelain vessels. They created this and other designs by painting cobalt oxide with a brush onto white pottery before coating the object in transparent glaze and firing at around 2400°F, an old Chinese technique (called “sometsuke” in Japanese) that Korean artists introduced to southwestern Japan in the early 1600s.