Cast iron kettle, Ryūbundō 龍文堂 workshop, Kyōto – Japan, circa 1890-1910

Lost wax cast iron, patinated bronze lid with openwork lotus-shaped knob.

Signature engraved under the lid: 龍文堂造 (Ryūbundō zō, “made by Ryūbundō”).

Total height with handle: approx. 22 cm

Cast iron kettle (tetsubin) from the Ryūbundō workshop, famous in Kyoto since the end of the Edo period for its highly virtuoso artistic castings. The body, with its irregular iwa-hada ("stone skin") surface, has two contrasting faces: one adorned with a highly raised decoration of bamboo rising from a rocky ground; the other molded with a poem in stylized Chinese characters. This alternation of naturalist motif and calligraphy reflects the literary spirit specific to Kyoto, where poetry, nature, and the object of tea respond to each other.

Founded in the 18th century by Shikata Ryūbun, the Ryūbundō workshop was distinguished by its use of lost wax casting and a profoundly artistic approach to casting. Successive masters were not only craftsmen, but also painters, poets, and sinologists, nourishing their work with scholarly references. Their search for a balance between poetry and material gave rise to objects of great subtlety, celebrated both in Japan and the West.

Ryūbundō kettles were successfully exhibited at national and world exhibitions in the late 19th century, where they embodied the union of Japanese technique and modern artistic taste. The writer Natsume Sōseki even mentioned Ryūbundō in his early 20th-century novels, mentioning their kettles as the pinnacle of refinement in the art of tea.

With its poetic composition and the tension between roughness and refinement, this kettle embodies the synthesis of literate taste and wabi-sabi sensibility specific to Kyoto around 1900. Comparable models are kept at the British Museum and the National Museum in Kyoto.