"Ogata Kenzan (1663-1743) is celebrated as Japan's most inventive creator of ceramic decoration and foremost workshop master. His reputation is a product both of his own time - an eighteenth-century Japanese guidebook noted his work as a "must-buy"--And of the modern age: the esteem in which he was held in Japan was ignited in the West as critics, art dealers, and collectors vied for his colorfully painted and inscribed work at the turn of the twentieth...