Page 33 - China's Renaissance in Bronze, The Robert H.CIague Collection of Later Chinese Bronzes 1100-1900

HIS MINIATURE HU HAS a compressed globular body resting on a
short, lightly splayed foot. Hexagonal in section, the long, straight
T neck rises vertically, an intaglio ring at its base clearly distinguishing
it from the body. An undecorated relief band sets off the vessel's mouth,
accentuating the hexagonal shape of the neck and echoing the plain circular
band that encompasses the lower edge of the foot. Their tops adorned with
flattened ruyi heads and their bases anchored to corners between facets,
two loop handles for the attachment of moveable bronze rings (now lost)
appear at right and left, just above the midpoint of the neck. An all-over
pattern of rolling waves in thread-relief lines covers the vase, the waves
serving as a foil for vaguely defined shapes in slightly broader lines that
are reminiscent of animals or birds. The inside of the short footring is plain,
but the inset flat base, apparently original, reveals a design closely related to
that on the body, a pattern of cresting waves with two butterfly-like shapes
in broader lines set against them.
The shape of this miniature vase derives from the long-necked,
bottle-like variant of the hu that was popular in both bronze 1 and ceramic
ware 2 during the Han dynasty. Although this interpretation of the hu fell
from favor after the collapse of the Han - replaced by a bottle type known
as baoping that has an ovoid body, slender neck, and flaring mouth and
that was perhaps introduced from India along with other paraphernalia
associated with the Buddhist church 3 - it found renewed popularity during
the Southern Song, as evinced by Longquan-celadon examples, 4 by ones in
grayish-blue glazed guan ware, 5 and by Jizhou examples painted in under-
glaze iron-brown slip. 6 Han-dynasty examples are apparently restricted to
ones of circular section, but Southern Song ceramic examples include both
circular and faceted ones, the faceted ones usually octagonal in section. 7
The Clague vessel's unusual combination of circular body and hexagonal
neck is otherwise unknown among bronze and ceramic shapes of the
Song and Yuan periods; it attests to the artists' enormous creativity and
to their constant experimentation with shape and decoration to find the
most aesthetically pleasing combination. In choice of shape, then, this hu
draws on the classical Han hu bottle but, in faceting the neck, interprets it
in a manner redolent of the Southern Song.
By the Southern Song, water had become an important genre of
painting in its own right, usually presented as rolling waves, sometimes
with whitecaps. Southern Song paintings on paper and silk occasionally
feature cresting waves as their principal subject matter 8 and Southern Song
ceramics from the Jizhou kilns sometimes carry patterns of rolling waves

T H E R O B E R T II. C L A G U E C O L L E C T I O N 2 9