Overview

The back of this dark brown mirror has been coated with black lacquer; its reflective face plated in tin. The knob surround takes the form of pistils spread out around the knob like flower petals. The medium-sized rim is straight sided; on the inner surface of the rim (upper right) are rough spots resulting from casting flaws. An early example of mirrors with willow tree, excavated from Mitarashi Pond near Mount Haguro, in Yamagata Prefecture, is the 12th century Chinese Song-style (960-1279) mirror, now in the collection of the Hosomi Art Foundation (Kyoto), decorated with a wave-swept shoreline, a willow tree, and paired birds. After the beginning of the Kamakura period (1185-1333), mirrors decorated with the branches of a weeping willow entirely filling the pictorial space began to appear. This followed a general trend in the visual arts toward packing the whole composition full of design elements. The stylistic expression revealed in the details of the museum mirror, such as the feathers of the birds and the grasses on the sandy shore, closely resemble that of mirrors Mirror with Chrysanthemum Branches and Pair of Sparrows (EK207) and Mirror with Chrysanthemums and Flying Sparrows (EK17-54), suggesting a production date of the latter half of the 13th century.