WARES OF KYŌTŌ
thirty-two years of age. She lived to be eighty-five, and during the whole period of her widowhood she appears to have made the manufacture of pottery and the writing of poetry her chief pastimes. In both she showed much proficiency. Until a recent date strips of illuminated paper with verses in her own handwriting used to be sold in Kyōtō. Many of these compositions are full of grace and feeling. It is related that within an hour of her decease she composed the lines:—
Tsuyu hodo mo
kokoro ni kakaru
kumo mo nashi
kyo wo kagiri no
yūgure no sora
(Without the shadow of a cloud to darken my soul
The sun of my life sets in a clear evening sky.)
Her ware, known generally as Rengetsu-yaki, is unglazed and without enamel decoration. The pâte is thin and hard—manufactured with clay from Shigaraki, in Omi, and Higashi-yama, in Kyōtō—and the decoration is plastic, a characteristic design being a lotus flower and leaves, modelled with admirable fidelity. It has been said that she derived her artist name from her skill in modelling this flower (ren), but the truth is that she chose her subject for the sake of her name. On most of her pieces she wrote verses composed by herself. Rengetsu did not bake her own ware. This part of the work she entrusted to Taizan, of Gojō-zaka, Rokubei of Kyōmizu, or Kuado of Shimogawara. The last-named potter imitated her methods, and specimens of Kuroda Rengetsu-yaki are scarcely to be distinguished from the genuine pottery of Otagaki Rengetsu.
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