Page 58 - Christie;es Marchant January 18 2018

PROPERTY FROM A PRIVATE SOUTHERN COLLECTION

Page from a tea cultivation album.

103
A VERY RARE SET OF BLUE AND WHITE ‘TEA CULTIVATION’ DISHES
QIANLONG PERIOD, CIRCA 1750
Painted with the various stages of tea cultivation within borders of rocaillerie, numbered in underglaze blue to reverse, in various sizes
15¿ in. (38.5 cm.) diameter, the largest (17)
$40,000-60,000

In the 1690s the Kangxi Emperor commissioned a work to portray signifcant Chinese industries, the Gengzhi tu, or Illustrations of
Ploughing and Weaving. This album of woodblock prints outlining the stages of silk cultivation and rice production was then expanded
by the Qianlong Emperor to include porcelain production.
Westerners were fascinated by these exotic Chinese industries. Both tea and silk were luxuries previously unknown in Europe, and tea,
in particular, had become the driving commercial force of the China trade by the mid-18th century. Export artists created watercolor
and gouache albums for their Western clientele delineating the stages of tea cultivation in highly idealized and romanticized views.
Vary rarely, these themes appeared as decoration on porcelain. One or two famille
rose tea services were made depicting merchants in a tea warehouse; a single
set of famille rose plates with the theme is known. Examples from
the present series, with its exuberant rococo borders after Delft,
are found in Dutch public collections, and it seems likely
that the original commission was from a Dutch tea
merchant. There are 23 subjects known in the series,
each numbered but not in a logical order. The
Chinese porcelain enamelers would of course not
have been familiar with Arabic
numerals on watercolors,
but they certainly
copied these fat
art subjects onto
round dishes
masterfully.