Lot 159: An Exceptional And Rare Ceramic ‘Quail Cage’ Koro (Incense Burner)

Okay, so in front of me is lot number 159 in our Fine Japanese Art Auction on June 12th, beginning at 1 p.m. Central European Time. I would say it's a rather special one, once again, and a rather unusual one. We have a quail cage, rather inconspicuous from the outside, looks like a rather normal cage. Of course, it's a kutani ware. We have vibrant colors of green, blue, and also some enameling, very nice. But actually, it reveals, once you lift the cage, there are two very, very fine quails hidden within, which relates to quails often being shown in their cage, similar to cockfighting. And one of them has a little removable head and pierced underneath the feathers, so to actually function as an incense burner, a koru. And there you can place some incense, and what happens is that the smoke rises from the underside of the quail, from the feathers, and then actually comes out from the cage, which creates this very amazing-looking smoke pattern, which we can see also on the photos that we took. And you can see also a very nice picture of the quail on the interior, as viewed from the exterior. So here you can see how they look once the cage is taken off. You can see that this here is removable, and this is exactly where the incense smoke goes inside. And I'll just carefully put this back. And we believe this to be, I would say, 19th century late Edo period. It could be a little bit earlier, but we were unable to find this exact design. In our research, we could only find a, I would say, similar color palette and similar modeling on a kutaniware hawk on a rock. This was dated into the third quarter of the 19th century in the Victorian Albert Museum. So right now it appears like a unique object, but ceramics like this were never made as one. So it would be very interesting to find the exact same one, and then reliably date it. If you know something, let us know. In any case, this lot has a starting price of 3,000 and a high estimate of 6,000. So I would say very reasonable for such a unique and interesting artwork, and I wish you the very best to win it.