074 Kakiemon Elephant

This beautifully crafted model elephant tells the story of how personal taste and a desire for the exotic influenced trade around the world in the seventeenth century. Although the model’s tusks and trunk tell us what kind of animal it is, its eyes look quite out of place on the elephant’s face. Like the print of a rhinoceros created by Albrecht Dürer, this piece of luxury porcelain has been designed by an artist who had probably never seen an elephant in the flesh. Real elephants would not have been seen in Japan when this model was made, and the artist has probably based the design on Indian drawings of elephants in processions.

The elephant is made in a style called Kakiemon, which was enormously popular in Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Models of animals, such as dogs, cats, deer, boars and horses, were made as ornaments for European customers who prized Japanese artworks and paid large sums of money for them. It was not important to the European market whether elephants came from Japan or not—they simply wanted an exotic taste of the Orient. By 1639, traders of the Dutch East India Company were the only Europeans allowed to trade with Japan. They maintained a trading factory at Nagasaki, a city which consequently became the gateway for trade with Europe. Merchants brought goods from other parts of Asia to Japan and took back precious metals, lacquer and porcelains like this elephant. Today, Kakiemon style porcelain survives in collections all over England, including at royal residences like Windsor Castle and Hampton Court Palace.