Page 129 - China's Renaissance in Bronze, The Robert H.CIague Collection of Later Chinese Bronzes 1100-1900

the surfaces with gold, silver, and cinnabar red. The Clague censer incorpo-
rates elements from both the guan ware and Xuande bronze traditions
(perhaps through woodblock-printed catalogs); chance contact with a rare
Tang bronze example might have inspired the Clague censer's engraved
decoration, though such bird and flower motifs are so common in Chinese
art that mere coincidence may account for its appearance on both.
Judging by the illustration in Xuande yiqi tupu, Xuande censers, like
their guan-ware models, had a square corner at the bottom of the bowl,
rather than the softened transition of the Clague censer. In addition, their
legs, like those of guan-ware censers, were apparently smaller in propor-
tion to the vessel than those of the present piece. The diameter of the
guan-ware censer's bowl, however, is greater in relation to its height than
that of either the Xuande yiqi tupu or the Clague example.
The Clague censer's bowl, legs, and ribs were integrally cast, but its
fine-line decoration was engraved after casting. Although many have carved
decoration [11, 22] and many others have cast decoration to which fine-line
details have been added [13, 21], few Ming and Qing cast bronzes have
engraved decoration, perhaps because it is difficult to read, easily over-
powered by both the form and the material of the vessel. Still, several
large, bronze vases - whose trumpet-mouthed yanyan form suggests a date
in the late seventeenth or first half of the eighteenth century - possess
engraved fine-line decoration, providing a starting point for the attribution
14
of the Clague censer. Though they differ in style, the engraved designs on
this censer recall in their complexity the silver-wire inlays on Shisou-manner
bronzes of the type conventionally ascribed to the eighteenth century.

T I I E R O B E R T II. C L A G U E C O L L E C T I O N 1 2 5