Page 88 - China's Renaissance in Bronze, The Robert H.CIague Collection of Later Chinese Bronzes 1100-1900

late Ming and Qing connoisseurs, in their elegant shapes, pleasing colors,
and exquisite casting - with the result that they were widely copied in
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succeeding centuries. Since virtually all of the thousands of original Xuande
imperial bronzes have now disappeared - except, perhaps, for small, largely
unpublished groups that remain in the Beijing and Taipei branches of the
Qing palace collection and thus have more claim than most to authenticity,
at least in terms of provenance - copies and imitations afford a measure of
insight into the celebrated world of Xuande bronzes. 4
Cast in the seventeenth century, this censer numbers among those
imitations. Like the gu/-shaped censers of the Xuande period, this censer
derives ultimately from Bronze Age gui food-serving bowls [compare 12],
though its form reflects the strong imprint of Song-dynasty guan and
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Longquan ceramic censers, the models on which the Xuande censers were
based. The organic profile and the yoke-shaped handles in the form of
dragons with arched backs and with heads and tails that project beyond
their anchoring posts attest to the Song ceramic connection; the sleek
styling, by contrast, discloses the more immediate descent from Xuande
bronzes, 6 or, more likely, from replicas of them.
Although it preserves the general form of a Xuande bronze, this
censer is a free interpretation rather than a literal copy of such a piece.
The 1526 edition of Xuande yiqi tupu (Illustrated Catalogue of Xuande
Sacral Vessels) includes woodblock-printed illustrations of several gui-
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shaped censers of similar form; the bronzes in the illustrations have handles
identical in shape to those on the Clague censer, but they have a larger
footring and a less dramatic profile. The illustrations thus reveal Xuande
censers to be closer to Song-dynasty ceramics than to the Clague censer in
their proportions, but perhaps intermediate between the two in sleekness
of design. The elegant but mannered form distinguishes the Clague censer
from Xuande-period examples and dates it to the seventeenth century.
Although Xuande bronzes are said to be heavy in relation to Song-Yuan
bronzes [see 2-6] and to early Ming non-imperial bronzes [see 7,8], the thick
walls and relative weight of this censer also find more parallels among the
cast bronzes of the late Ming and early Qing [compare 11,13] than they do
among the few bronzes credibly attributed to the Xuande period.
According to late Ming and Qing connoisseurs, beauty and variety
of surface color ranked among the most prized characteristics of Xuande
bronzes. 8 Descriptions range, among others, from jadeite green, mulberry
purple, and ripe crab-apple red to hibiscus yellow, date red, and chestnut
and wax-tea brown. Other bronzes apparently had mottled surfaces

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