Page 18 - FIsh Bowl Xuande Period, April 2017 Sotheby's
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Zhu Zhanji (1399-1435), the Xuande Emperor, Lotus Pond and Pine Tree,
handscroll, ink and colours on silk
Ming dynasty, Xuande period
© Palace Museum, Beijing
Cai’s painting, where some shes are chasing blossoms shed jar in the Museum of Oriental Ceramics, Osaka, from the Ataka
by an overhanging owering branch. The deep, barbed mallow collection (see Tōyō tōji no tenkai/Masterpieces of Oriental
shape of the bowl, with ten sharp ridges inside and with the Ceramics, The Museum of Oriental Ceramics, Osaka, 1999,
foot cut to correspond, cleverly reinforces the impression of cat. no. 33). The scene on the present bowl appears to have
rippling waves and together with the naturalistic depiction of been directly inspired by such Yuan porcelain prototypes – a
the shes creates an astonishingly vibrant, lively e ect. very rare feature for Xuande imperial blue-and-white. The
four shes on our bowl depict the same species as those on
On the present bowl, the painters managed to exploit the the jar in the Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York; and another
cobalt pigment to maximum e ect and to create an amazingly exhibited in 2002 at Eskenazi, London; and the feature of
rich tonal variation in this monochrome palette: the shes the frilly lotus leaves is already found on the famous Yuan
are drawn with dark blue outlines and details over pale blue jar in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, from the Oscar C.
washes; on the leaves the veins are in contrast reserved in Raphael collection, which depicts ducks in a lotus pond. For
white, being incised through the blue washes down to the the two ‘ sh’ jars see Chinese Art under the Mongols. The
porcelain body; and the large leaves that are rendered with Yüan Dynasty (1279-1368), The Cleveland Museum of Art,
frayed edges, as if about to wilt, are accentuated with dark Cleveland, 1968, cat. no. 155; and Two Rare Chinese Porcelain
heaping and piling, a feature that appears to have been Fish Jars of the 14th and 16th Centuries, Eskenazi, London,
deliberately induced. 2002, cat. no. 1, where all three ‘ sh’ jars are illustrated
together, compared with related Chinese ink paintings of
A large wilting lotus leaf, similarly rendered with fuzzy edges,
appears next to a diminutive bird in an ink painting of a lotus shes, including the painting by Liu Cai, and where the sh-
pond signed yubi (‘imperial brush’), executed by the Xuande pond motif is further discussed by Regina Krahl and Sarah
Emperor, who was not only a devoted patron of the arts but Wong; for the Fitzwilliam Museum’s ‘ducks’ jar see Margaret
is also considered as a gifted artist himself; see Craig Clunas Medley, Yüan Porcelain and Stoneware, London, 1974, col. pl.
and Jessica Harrison-Hall, eds, Ming. 50 Years that Changed C.
China, The British Museum, London, 2014, p. 177, g. 154 ( g.
2). Only one other Xuande bowl of this basic shape and design,
of lower proportions and much smaller in size (18.4 cm),
As a porcelain motif, the lotus pond was taken up by appears to have been published, in the National Palace
Jingdezhen’s porcelain painters already in the Yuan dynasty Museum, Taipei, included in the Museum’s exhibition Mingdai
(1279-1368), and some of the nest Yuan blue-and-white jars Xuande guanyao jinghua tezhan tulu/Catalogue of the Special
are painted with this subject, such as, for example, the ‘ sh’ Exhibition of Selected Hsüan-te Imperial Porcelains of the
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