These vessels were thrown on a pottery wheel and belong to the studio pottery tradition. As with all Edmund de Waal’s mature work, they are made from Limoges porcelain. In 1993, de Waal returned to London from Japan following a two-year scholarship with the Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation during which he worked at the Mejiro Ceramics Studio in Tokyo. He took a studio in South London and began to make porcelain vessels that were informed by his studies in Japan. His use of pale celadon glazes—a variety of ineffable hues in blue and green—was partly suggested by medieval Korean ceramics, which are highly prized in Japan. These jars are impressed with antique Chinese or Japanese seals, which de Waal still keeps in his studio. Fresh from the potter’s wheel while the clay was wet, the jars were pressed inwards to create their distinctive uneven shape. De Waal referred to his wares of this period as kitchen porcelain. In 1996, he explained that his ceramics were neither wholly decorative nor wholly practical. ‘This is porcelain that can be lived with and handled; kitchen porcelain.’ These two vessels were made at a period in which de Waal’s reputation began to grow exponentially. At the start of the nineties he was exhibiting exclusively and infrequently in England. By the end of the decade his work was being shown by galleries in London, New York and several European cities, as well as in museum exhibitions such as The New White: Contemporary Studio Porcelain held at the Victoria & Albert Museum in 1999.