Page 159 - Later Chinese Bronzes from the Collection of Ulrich-Hk 2014

wares of the Song, Yuan and Ming dynasties. Robert Mowry in his work on the Phoenix Art Museum exhibition
China’s Renaissance in Bronze, Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix, 1993, p. 169, mentions the appearance of fine paper
enlivened with flecks of gold and silver from the early 15th century and suggests that this ‘might have also played a
role in the creation of such abstract decoration, either directly inspiring those who designed the bronzes or indirectly
moulding taste to appreciate objects sprinkled with gold and silver’. Furthermore, Soame Jenyns and William Watson
in Chinese Art. The Minor Arts II, London, 1963, p. 166, illustrate a bronze double vase with gold inlay in the form of
splashes, pl. 50, which the authors describe as ‘decorated with elaborately simulated patches of apparent corrosion,
the rough projecting parts consisting of pure gold, resembling unworked nuggets and grains inserted into the bronze’.
In Hausmann’s opinion, this is one of the very rare group of Xuande mark and period incense burners, comparable to
the six-character Xuande-marked gold-splashed censer from the Palace Museum, Beijing, illustrated in Wenwu, 1979,
Issue 12, p. 84. The Palace Museum scholars writing in that issue of Wenwu argued that this is the only type of
Xuande marked gold splashed incense burner which is almost certainly of the period.