Page 372 - Sotheby's October 3 2017 Chinese Art

3708
A KESI ‘HUNDRED BOYS’ PANEL
QING DYNASTY, QIANLONG
PERIOD
skillfully and brightly woven in silk with finer
details delicately pencilled in ink, depicting a
young boy dressed in official robes holding a vase with the auspicious motif of playful children in
with three arrows beside a smaller boy carrying a
ruyi sceptre, surrounded by further boys at play
and engaged in various pursuits including dragon
dance, flying lanterns, lighting firecrackers,
paying tributes to the star gods, spinning
top, playing chess, fighting cricket and bird,
picnicking, playing hide and seek, and ball games, Ming dynasty, the motif came to represent the
set in a fenced garden landscape with flowering
trees and jagged rockwork with flying bats, below
distant mountains and further trees emerging
from vapourous clouds, all reserved against a rich the Qing dynasty.
orange-red ground
195 by 207 cm, 76¾ by 81½ in.
HK$ 800,000-1,000,000
US$ 103,000-128,000
清乾隆 緙絲嬰戲圖掛幅
370 SOTHEBY’S 蘇富比
This vibrant panel is an impressive example
of kesi embroidery, a type of silk tapestry that
entailed the intricate hand-weaving of decorative
designs and brocades, sacred iconography or
calligraphy often employed for the production of
imperial textiles. Kesi panels finely embroidered
various pursuits were used as bed hangings
in matrimonial chambers. The baizi (‘hundred
boys’) motif refers to the sons of King Wen,
the legendary father of the founder of the Zhou
dynasty King Wu, who had ninety-nine sons and
adopted one more to make one hundred. By the
wish for many sons, and was reproduced on a
variety of media, including porcelain and lacquer,
and the theme continued to be employed through
Kesi of this type and decoration were used as
curtains of palace bedchambers, for example see
some hanging in situ in the Kunninggong (Palace
of Earthly Tranquility) in the Forbidden City,
published in Qingdai gongting shenghuo [Life in
the Palace during the Qing dynasty], Hong Kong,
1985, pl. 404.
For the Ming dynasty prototypes, see one woven
in vivid polychrome silk and gold-wrapped thread,
sold in our London rooms, 12th July 2006, lot
59, and again in these rooms, 7th April 2015, lot
3117; and two sold in our New York rooms, the
first, from the Mary Porter Walsh collection, sold
on 28th November 1994, lot 170, and the second,
originally included in the exhibition Threads of
Imagination: Central Asian and Chinese Silks from
the Twelfth to the Nineteenth Century, Spink &
Son Ltd, London, 1999, cat. no. 21 and sold 17th
September 2013, lot 215.