Page 82 - Mounted Oriental Porcelain, The Getty Museum

COMMENTARY
The lower bowl is cracked.
The incised underglaze decoration, made by metal
tools when the paste was leather hard before the first
firing, is a technique that goes back to the Song dynasty
(960-1278). The green color that resulted from the fir-
ing of the iron and titanium oxides was also revived dur-
ing the Kangxi period.
The use of bowls of Chinese porcelain mounted
together in gilt bronze of similar design is not uncom-
mon. A pair of gray-crackled glazed bowls at Waddes-
3
don Manor, England, has very similar mounts that are
also struck with crowned C's. Pairs of crackled bowls of
differing shape, but all bearing mounts of the same form
(with the exception of the finial), have passed through
the London and Paris art markets in 1970, 1980, 1982,
4
1992, and I998. Perhaps the earliest description in an
auction catalogue for lidded potpourri bowls of celadon
porcelain is that found in the 1905 Christie's sale of
E. H. Baldock Jr.'s "Old French Decorative Objects,"
FIG. 130 most of which had been inherited from his father.
Lot 105 reads:

FIG. i3E. The lid with the gilt-bronze finial removed.

L I D D E D B O W L 69