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Kiku’s vase is painted freehand across its full surface with coral chrysanthemums, the petals built up in fine, layered strokes that radiate from the center of each bloom, set among lobed blue leaves on a white ground. A blue band circles the neck. The chrysanthemum, kiku in Japanese, is a recurring motif of East Asian porcelain, and the pairing of blue with red-orange recalls Japanese Imari ware. The painter draws on both through chinoiserie, the European reading of Asian ceramic decoration.
The underside carries a hand-painted mark in green, “arcola,” above the date 25-V-1971, with the month in Roman numerals: 25 May 1971. The name corresponds to Cerámicas Arcola, a workshop in Manises, near Valencia.
About Cerámicas Arcola
Antonio Testón Sixto founded Cerámicas Arcola in 1956 in Manises, near Valencia. A Fine Arts graduate, he had been a founding partner and artistic director of Cerámicas Hispania, the Manises factory that pioneered Spain’s postwar revival of artistic porcelain, and he left it that year to start his own firm. Arcola began as a maker of majolica in a town whose Spanish ceramic tradition reaches back to the fourteenth century, and it remains in the family under Testón’s grandson, Antonio Testón Cuesta.
