Japanese Export Porcelain

Book excerpt: An enduring witness to Dutch-Japanese relations is Arita export porcelain made for the Dutch market in the 17th and 18th centuries. The Dutch East India Company (VOC) was instrumental in ordering and distributing a variety of export wares. Private trade also played an important role. This resulted in the importation of large amounts of Japanese porcelain into The Netherlands. While many of these exquisite pieces have been lost over time, numerous examples are still preserved in public and private collections in The Netherlands. The author discusses the variety of export ware and the extraordinary pieces in those collections, many of which are published here for the first time. This survey offers a fascinating insight into a relatively unknown aspect of Dutch-Japanese interaction and is the first book of its kind devoted to this subject in English.