He was less enthusiastic about what he called the “Oriental porcelain display of peculiar beauty.” Still, two teapots described as Korean made enough of an impression to be singled out: one was “the rudest clay,” though “expressive”; the other “roughly” decorated in an “odd and effective” manner.
The remarks are striking not only for their tone but also because we cannot be certain the objects were Korean at all. Korea’s ports had only recently opened to foreign trade, and knowledge of Korean art in the United States was minimal. Early assessments of “Korean” art were shaped by limited access and echoed a dominant narrative promoted by Japanese scholars, who characterized Korean ceramics as purely utilitarian and accidentally charming rather than deliberately designed.
Within a few decades, however, Korean ceramics were made visible through newly formed museum collections such as that of the Art Institute. In an article for the magazine House & Garden, Gardner Teall, art critic and author of The Pleasures of Collecting, wrote enthusiastically about Goryeo (918–1392) celadon, a stoneware coated in a luminous bluish-green glaze. Teall emphasized the deliberateness of their design and the care of their makers, highlighting inventive forms such as a bamboo sprout–shaped wine pot and what he described as “exquisite flower sprays.” He directly rejected the prevailing claim that Korean pottery was made carelessly or without sustained attention to beauty.
Goryeo celadon featured in Home & Garden
The intricate inlays and delicate forms of the celadon served as evidence of aesthetic intention and technical mastery.
More than one-third of the Art Institute’s Korean collection was gifted by Russell Tyson (1867–1963), a real estate broker and avid collector of East Asian art, and nearly 90% of his Korean gifts are Goryeo celadon. His taste decisively shaped how Korean art would be represented in Chicago.
Lithograph advertising the Trans-Pacific steamship named Korea, which Tyson boarded to get to Asia in 1909.
At the time, American diplomats such as William Woodville Rockhill (1854–1914), United States Ambassador to China, were assembling Korean anthropological artifacts on behalf of the US National Museum—known today as the Smithsonian—and in correspondence with celadon collectors. Tyson’s interest developed along a different axis. He was not building an ethnographic archive or advancing a nationalist project. He responded to celadon as an aesthetic object. His home started to resemble an antique showroom, furnished with cabinets of porcelain, sculpture, imported Chinese furniture, and silk brocades. A later tribute to Tyson in the Art Institute’s bulletin recalled that “it had to be beautiful or he would not consider it.”
Photograph of Tyson lounging in his living room from a feature titled “CHICAGO’S FABULOUS COLLECTORS” in a 1952 issue of Life Magazine.
Unfortunately, a lot of celadon entered circulation through unscientific excavation and looting of burial sites. In the years surrounding the Russo-Japanese War (1904–05), when Japan took control of the Korean peninsula, railway construction led to new tomb discoveries near Kaesŏng, the former Goryeo capital. Contemporary accounts describe Japanese residents and dealers locating tombs by inserting metal rods into the ground, a method that damaged many vessels. Some of Tyson’s early acquisitions still bear dark metal repairs over severed portions of their bodies.
Even so, Tyson was eager to share these fragmented discoveries. The same year he returned from his trip, he lent “two pieces of excavated Corean[sic] pottery” to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. In 1914, it mounted a major East Asian ceramics exhibition that lent from leading American collections, including Tyson.
Works lent by Tyson to the MFA
Korea
Vase, Goryeo dynasty (918–1392), 13th century
Korea
Korea
The show proved enormously popular and sharpened celadon’s visibility in the United States. Demand, along with prices, rose quickly among both collectors and museums. Although these 1914 exhibitions did not come to Chicago as the objects were considered too fragile to travel, some of the objects did, gradually, through Tyson. He not only gifted his own celadon but also acquired works from other collections on the Art Institute’s behalf. Several pieces shown in Boston can now be identified in the Art Institute’s holdings.
auction catalogue
This catalogue in the Art Institute library and archives references the MFA Boston exhibition.
Page from auction catalogue: note the prices marked in red.
Korea
This expanding market unfolded within a tightening colonial framework. As Japanese authority consolidated on the peninsula, cultural property protections were formalized. Objects that once entered circulation through covert looting were increasingly filtered through imperial systems that established colonial museums, directed excavation practices, and distributed works to Japanese elites and commercial venues such as department stores.
Japanese postcard dating from the Taishō era (1912–26)
Advertising “Joseon customs,” it depicts an old Korean potter painting the surface of a celadon vessel.
Even within this shifting structure, Tyson made another collecting trip to Korea in 1920 and continued acquiring celadon for decades through dealers and auctions of other collections. The ability to purchase such works at escalating prices was often beyond the reach of Koreans themselves, who faced economic constraint and cultural hesitation toward disturbing burial sites.
A number of Tyson’s acquisitions reflect his proximity to the Japanese collecting sphere that shaped restoration practices as well as access. On some vessels, brilliant gold traces the cracks, lacquer dusted with gold in the Japanese technique of kintsugi. These repairs did not attempt to conceal damage but embraced and aestheticized it as a part of the object’s history. Museum records indicate that certain pieces were sent to Japan for restoration, reflecting Japan’s authority over the circulation and conservation of Korean cultural property during the colonial period. Even accession numbers marking the year of entry into the Art Institute’s collection were written in gold on the bases of some vessels.
Korean Works Embellished with Gold
Korea
Korea
Korea
By the time of his death in 1963, Tyson had developed a deep relationship with the Art Institute as an honorary trustee, vice president, and chairman of the museum’s then-called Oriental Committee, with a gallery named in his honor. Celadon, alongside hundreds of other East Asian objects, moved from his bedroom, library, and kitchen into the museum’s galleries, transforming his private possessions into an institutional foundation.
highlights of Tyson’s contributions
Korea
Korea
Korea
Korea
In 2024, almost a century and a half from the museum’s first public encounter with “Korean” ceramics, the Art Institute opened a permanent gallery dedicated to the arts of Korea. Building on Tyson’s foundation, the luminous celadon pieces now exist within a wider field of visual relations, shaped in part through active collaboration and loans from the National Museum of Korea. In this setting, the gold-set repairs on the celadon still glint under the lights, carrying a history of trade and repair, but they no longer bind the vessels to a singular idea of Korea.
—Haemin Kim, McMullan Arts Leadership Intern, Provenance Research
Learn More
Explore more works from the Russell Tyson collection.
Learn how provenance research unfolds at the Art Institute.
