Dish with Chinese boys in a garden

In the center of this dish, two Chinese boys wearing ancient Chinese garb are surrounded by garden rocks, tropical plants, and flowering trees, all depicted in the standard iro-e colors—green, red, yellow, and gold over underglaze blue. The fence behind the boys helps identify their location as a palace garden. Pictures of aristocratic ancient Chinese boys in gardens had been introduced by the 1300s from China, where they appeared as good luck motifs on paintings, ceramics, and lacquerware. They remained a popular pictorial motif on Japanese decorative objects through the 1800s.