Vase in with a flaring horizontal profile and shallow depth that narrows as it rises to the curving, rectangular mouth; the sides ornamented with at the top with an irregular disc of rippling gold, bordered by sweeping mirror black over a sea of shimmering silver. Of hammered silver inlaid on the sides with hammered shakudo, the lower portion of the inlay patinated black and the upper rippling disc gilt through which can be seen the shimmering pink of unpatinated shakudo. On the reverse chiseled with a date and signature by the artist: Showa San-ju-go Nen, Aki, Habara Ichiyo Saku or Showa (era) 35th Year (1960), in Autumn, Made by Habara Ichiyo (Habara Ichiyo, born 1914). Showa 35 or 1960.

With a new paulownia wood storage box; and with the original cypress wood and sumi ink exhibition label inscribed: Nitten-sakka Habara Ichiyo Sakuhin, Hi or Nitten Artist Habara Ichiyo Work of Art (titled) The Sun.

This vase was made for exhibition at the 3rd Reformed Nitten in 1960 and it is illustrated in the Nittenshi, volume 23, page 253, number 240. Note: the Nitten photograph shows the front face of the artwork.

Habara Ichiyo was born in Takamatsu in 1914. He graduated from the Nagoya Art School, afterwards studying uchidashi or hammering as well as surface ornamentation such as chasing, inlaying and embossing of metal under Osuga Takashi (1901 – 1987).

Ichiyo frames the rippling, irregular corona of the sun with the mirror black void of night, above a shimmering, stippled sea of silver. On the front face of the vase the silver sweeps from the upper right down to the left in stippling with ridges polished into reflections; the mirror-black shakudo above it seems almost to flow like black ink from a calligraphy brush to a sharp point on the lower left. Deeply hammered, repeating bands trough the gold-pink corona around an ovoid center clouded with irregular texturing. These troughs read as ‘matte’ gold while the higher areas shimmer with reflective versus irregular, almost clouded surfaces. On the vase’s reverse side the designs reverse, flowing from left and down towards the lower right, mirroring the inlay on the front face. Unlike the front, the ovoid center of the star swirls in an angular rendition of an uzu or whirlpool motif.

Painting with hammers and chisels to compelling effect, Habara Ichiyo renders an impression of the sun glowing in space. This shimmers by flooding the surface with abstract patterning and contrasting polishing. He employs a very difficult window-inlay technique (kiribame-zogan) that demands exact tolerances between the inlay and the framing face of the vase, something immediately apparent only to his peers and connoisseurs of metalwork. Joyful and exuberant, this brilliant example of postwar metal art also smiles at the sun of Japan rising again over the sea. Who though would complain of this abstraction of tradition?