Page 16 - Bonhams Chinese Art London May 2013

fig.1 An incised anhua-decorated bowl, Xuande mark and period; image courtesy of the British
Museum, London.

The Property of a Lady 女士藏品

8 Porcelain from the Xuande reign, as with the preceding Yongle reign,
A rare incised anhua-decorated ‘lotus-seed’ bowl, lianziwan is noted for the supremely high quality of the body, potted from very
Xuande six-character mark and of the period pure, white clay brought from Macang. The quality of the material is
The almost hemispherical bowl potted with confidence and precision, particularly evident on white monochrome pieces, such as the present
raised on a short foot and delicately incised on the exterior with lot, enhanced by delicate anhua decoration. The Xuande reign also saw
elongated petals reaching up the sides of the bowl beneath a band of the development of the underglaze-blue Imperial reign mark, which
key-fret at the rim, the interior with a cluster of fruits on a leafy branch thereafter became the standard method of marking Imperial wares until
in the well, the bowl covered in a pale milky greenish-blue glaze pooling the end of the Qing Dynasty in 1911.
slightly into the incised decoration.
20.4cm (8in) diam. Several other examples of these incised white ‘lotus-seed’ bowls are
£40,000 - 60,000 published in museum and private collections. Two incised white lotus-
HK$470,000 - 710,000 CNY380,000 - 560,000 seed bowls in the collection of the British Museum, one from the
Sedgwick Collection with a Xuande mark and the other without a mark,
明宣德 暗花蓮瓣紋蓮子碗 青花「大明宣德年製」楷書款 are illustrated by J.Harrison-Hall, Ming Ceramics in the British Museum,
London, 2001, nos. 4:2 and 4:3 (see fig.1 above). Another similar bowl
Provenance: an English private collection, acquired in the 1970s but with double petals incised on the exterior, in the National Palace
Museum, Taipei, is illustrated in the Catalogue to the Special Exhibition
來源：英國私人收藏，購於1970年代 of Selected Hsüan-te Imperial Porcelains of the Ming Dynasty, 1998,
no.153. Another example, Xuande mark and of the period, formerly in
the Carl Kempe Collection, was sold at Christie’s Hong Kong, 30 May
2012, lot 3981.

12 | Bonhams