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I have an antique bronze or brass elephant that my mother inherited from her mother, which I then inherited from my mother. I don't know where her mother got it or its age.
It is small nut heavy for its size(2 lbs), and measures approximately 7" from tail to tip of trunk and 3.75" high.
I asked a friend of mine who is from China about the writing on the foot. She said it looked like an old mountain dialect that was no longer used and she couldn't really make it out. Someone else said it look Japanese.
Any help would be greatly appreciated!
Carol

Most bronze castings I've seen of elephants like this one are from Japan. The two characters on the foot of it appear to be "寶洲", which might be pronounced "Takarashima", among other Japanese transcription possibilities. The same two in Chinese Mandarin would be "baozhou". Meaning in both languages is "Treasure Island". Elephant models in bronze were popular in the late Victorian period, and they were produced for export in large numbers by various Japanese sculptors and foundries.

Best regards,

Bill H.

Yes, Japanese, the characters on the base are 寳州 or 寳洲 but I'm not sure of the Japanese pronunciation.

Hi Carol,

I'm afraid that your friend from China was passing you off with an excuse because they couldn't read these characters. They are not some mountain dialect or not used nowadays. They are conventional characters, albeit written in a choppy style. They read Treasure Country. 寶洲. In Chinese this would be Bao Zhou, in Japanese, HoShu (or similar).

To read the characters on your computer, select the text encoding to UTF-8, and they will be easy to see.

Indeed, a Japanese bronze elephant okimono from the Meiji period, made for the export markets in Europe and the USA. I read the signature here as 'Hoshu'. Casted around the 1880-90s.

Guy.

Thank you all so much for your input! I don't know what "select the
text encoding to UTF-8" means?

Carol, UTF-8 is the Unicode setting for viewing character sets in HTML format. Go to your browser's Menu Bar and select the "View" menu. From its list select "Encoding", and from that drop-down menu you'll be able to click the UTF-8 setting. You might want to make a note of your current settings before changing them so in case you now have special language requirements, you can reset the encoding after viewing the kanji characters.

And thanks to MikeOz and Guy for pitching in with the correct Japanese transcription of the name Hoshu (寶洲). It'll be a long time before machine translations catch up with the brains of people with the smarts to know what the heck they're doing.

Best regards,

Bill H.

Thank you Bill! Do you have an idea of the value if I were to sell it?

I tried to find some auction results at the outset and came up with nothing definitive. I include the links below for 1992 Christies (London) and 2005 Nagel (Stuttgart) sale results for bronze articles signed "Hoshu". However, these sales neither involved elephants nor showed pictures of the signature. In such cases, where there is a dearth of collateral information on the artist, it is dangerous to conclude based on a transcribed name alone that the results pertain to a signature using the same characters found in your mark. So view these links with caution.

http://www.auction.de/_scripts/nax_object.php?id=35109&language=e

http://www.christies.com/lotfinder/books-manuscripts/a-japanese-silvered-bronze-shaped-bowl-the-3528524-details.aspx?

Best regards,

Bill H.

Thank you all again so much for your help.

Dear Carol

Okimonos like this can be quite appealing. Created in Japan in the late 19th century by out-of-work former Samurai armourers made redundant by the abolition of the Samurai class in the 1860s. Only made for the Western market.

Okimonos can be worth a lot but it depends, some are much more sophisticated than others. I lack the knowledge to help you judge yours, having recently been burned trying to buy an Okimono hippo which turned out to be modern and British!

Rgds
JLim

Just found this site, wonder if you can identify the makers mark on my elephant. It looks the same as Hoshu, but I am not sure.

The characters 州 and 洲 are co-functional in Chinese, and I believe the usage carries over in kanji, making 寳州 and 寳洲 both readable as 'Hoshu'. However, confirmation from our Japanese contributors is always comforting.

Best regards,

Bill H.

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