Page 62 - Sotheby's October 3 2017 Song Ceramics

The exquisite state of preservation
of this washer would have
required reverential handling over
thousands of generations during
its nine-hundred-year long history.
When in 1151 a high civil official, Zhang Jun, who had moved south
together with the Song court, made a gift of sixteen pieces of Ru
ware to the Gaozong Emperor, it was a spectacular gesture that
unmistakeably documented his power and wealth, as well as his
allegiance to the Song court, and was duly recorded for posterity
(in the Wulin jiushi, a book of memories of Hangzhou written by
Zhou Mi, 1232-1308). How any official – however powerful – could
have amassed such a large number of pieces that were notoriously
difficult to come by, remains an open question, as only pieces
rejected by the court were supposedly allowed to be sold, and it is
unlikely that Zhang Jun would have offered the Emperor rejects of
that kind.
The high regard for Ru ware did not wane in the Ming dynasty
(1368-1644), when the term ‘sesame seed’ markings to describe
the ware’s characteristic minute spur marks, appears to have been
coined. It appears for the first time in print in 1591 in Gao Lian’s Zun among them the ‘narcissus basin’ with metal rim (no. 7 in the list
sheng ba jian [Eight discourses on the nurturing of life]. Unlike other
Song wares, Ru was, however, virtually not copied then, presumably
because too few pieces were in circulation to provide models. One
notable exception is a monochrome blue-glazed porcelain version
of an oval ‘narcissus basin’ of Xuande mark and period (1426-1435),
created by the Jingdezhen imperial kilns perhaps after a drawing
(Mingdai Xuande guanyao jinghua tezhan tulu/Catalogue of the
60 | SOTHEBY’S 蘇富比
Special Exhibition of Selected Hsüan-te Imperial Porcelains of the
Ming Dynasty, National Palace Museum, Taipei, 1998, pl. 36).
It was by sending originals from the palace in Beijing to the porcelain
kilns in south China as models, among them a Ru ‘narcissus basin’,
that the Yongzheng Emperor (r. 1723-1735) managed to revive
Ru shapes and glazes. A list of different porcelains ordered to
be made for the Emperor in 1732 lists “Uncrackled Ru glaze with
copper-coloured paste, copied from the colour of the glaze of two
pieces of the Song dynasty’, and ‘Ru glaze with fish-roe crackle of
copper-coloured paste, copied from the colours of the glaze of a
piece of the Song dynasty sent from the imperial palace” (Stephen
W. Bushell, Oriental Ceramic Art: Illustrated by Examples from the
Collection of W.T. Walters, New York, 1896; reprint London, 1981,
pp. 194f.). According to an inventory of 1729, thirty-one Ru brush
washers of various shapes and sizes, with and without inscriptions,
were kept in special, probably Japanese, lacquer boxes (Taipei,
2006, p. 25), some of them identifiable through their inscriptions
among pieces extant in Taipei today. Several Ru pieces are also
included in the two handscrolls titled Guwan tu (‘Pictures of
antiquities’), painted in the Yongzheng reign in 1728 and 1729,
respectively, which record art objects in the imperial collection,
below, see Regina Krahl, ‘Art in the Yongzheng Period: Legacy of
an Eccentric Art Lover’, Orientations, November/December 2005,
p. 65 top right), and the bowl from the Sir Percival David Collection
(no. 17, see China. The Three Emperors 1662 – 1795, Royal Academy
of Arts, London, 2005, cat. no. 168 bottom left).
The Qianlong Emperor (r. 1736-1795) ‘appropriated’ Ru ware by
having twenty-two of the eighty-seven extant pieces engraved with
his poems, thus contributing further to the fame of the ware, even