This thesis presents the first detailed study of the life and work of Seifu Yohei III, in either English or Japanese. Seifu Yohei III (1851-1914) was one of the leading ceramic artists of the Meiji period and highly acclaimed both in Japan and abroad during his lifetime. Being a literati-style painter and an unabashed Sinophile, Seifu created works that display the distinctive characteristics of Qing porcelain. The multi-faceted character of this artist provides an opportunity to explore crucial issues concerning the transformation of Japanese art in general at the beginning of Japan's modem age. The clientele for such works was an elite with similar predilections for Chinese-style wares, though patronage of his works extended even to the Imperial Household of Japan. A study of Seifu Yohei III demonstrates that Japanese ceramics cannot be discussed in terms of a linear, uniformly progressive development mirroring the Westernisation of Japan. Seifu's career reveals the co-existence of what might normally be perceived as irreconcilable factors in terms of its regional, social, economic and cultural environments, often involving interaction with China. Each chapter takes up a different issue surrounding Seifu Yohei III in the context of the production and consumption of art in Meiji Japan. This interdisciplinary analysis of the life and work of Seifu Yohei III also sheds light on the social, economic and cultural factors affecting other potters of the Meiji era. It takes on previously neglected issues concerning what happened in the area of ceramic production inside Japan and, more broadly, in East Asia as a whole.

Soft-paste porcelain was produced in Britain in great quantities between the mid-18th and early 19th centuries. Due to industrial secrecy and the complexities of creating a product that would survive high-temperature firing, a range of paste recipes was employed by dozens of factories. This has resulted in an array of porcelains which vary in their elemental composition and mineralogy. This research carries out a meta-analysis of the published data for porcelain bodies and glazes and concludes that some discrimination can be achieved using the major and minor elemental composition of the bodies, and that for the glazes intra-factory variation is often greater than inter-factory variation in composition. A pilot investigation of the trace elemental composition of British porcelain is carried out using Laser Ablation Inductively Coupled Plasma Mass Spectroscopy, which finds compositional groups corresponding to different sources of clay and silica raw materials. In the interests of preserving intact objects, there is recognised a need for a non-destructive method for analysing British porcelain, in order to provenance and date objects. Such a method would rely on data from the surface of the object, which is typically covered by glaze and over-glaze coloured enamels, and this research demonstrates that the formulae used for the glaze and enamels are in some cases characteristic of the factory, or workshop, and period at which they were created. Hand-Held XRF analysis is used to analyse the glaze, underglaze blue and polychrome enamels on a selection of porcelain objects from different factories, and compositional traits are identified that allow some factories and periods to be distinguished. Glass standards are developed, which are representative of the glaze and enamel composition, and which could allow X-ray fluorescence (XRF) data to be calibrated for fully quantitative results.