Page 16 - In His Majesty's Palm Excuisite Playthings April 5 17 HK Sothebys

This small stem cup represents in every respect a totally new
departure: the exceedingly tactile, characteristic, slightly
smoky material; the bright colours that must have been a
revelation, when they first came out of the kilns; the elegant
shape in new proportions, ever so faintly flared at the rim; the
concise flower medallions and pearl motifs, all outlined in blue; Reconstructing Chenghua porcelain, Sotheby’s, London,
and the mark written in a semi-circle on the underside of the
stem: nothing had been seen like this on porcelain before.
Only five, or perhaps merely four other stem cups of this
design appear to have survived: one in the Freer Gallery of
Art, Washington, D.C., is illustrated in Oriental Ceramics: The
World’s Great Collections, Tokyo, New York and San Francisco,
1980-82, vol. 9, fig. 115; and in Ming Porcelains in the Freer
Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1953, fig. 20; another in the
Palace Museum, Beijing, from the Qing court collection, has
been published in The Complete Collection of Treasures of the
Palace Museum. Porcelains in Polychrome and Contrasting
Colours, Hong Kong, 1999, pl. 172 right (fig. 1), together with
a doucai stem cup with lotus medallions but a plain flaring
stem, pl. 172 left, and one of the same shape as the present
piece, but decorated with a stylised lotus scroll, pl. 173; and
a third one is illustrated in A.D. Brankston, Early Ming Wares
of Chingtechen, Peking, 1938, pl. 27c, where it is attributed
to the David Collection; however, according to Suzanne G.
Valenstein in Ming Porcelains. A Retrospective, China House
Gallery, China Institute in America, New York, 1970-71, p. 54, it Jianfugong Huayuan, the gardens of the Palace of Establishing
never belonged to Sir Percival, but is the cup from the George
Eumorfopoulos Collection, sold in our London rooms, 30th
May 1940, lot 295, and again 9th November 1954, lot 69, from
14 SOTHEBY’S 蘇富比
the collection of Dr Henry de Laszlo; a fourth cup was sold in
these rooms, 26th October 2003, lot 11.
Julian Thompson in his ‘List of Patterns of Chenghua Porcelain
in Collections Worldwide’ in The Emperor’s broken china.
1995, pp. 116-129 records the present pattern as D40 and
lists another stem cup of this design in the Musée Guimet,
Paris, apparently unpublished; this may, however, be the
Eumorfopoulos cup.
No piece of this design appears to be remaining in the National
Palace Museum, Taipei, which owns the largest number of
Chenghua doucai pieces. A deliberately destroyed stem cup
of this design, reconstructed from sherds found at the Ming
imperial kiln site in Jingdezhen, was included in Sotheby’s 1995
exhibition The Emperor’s broken china, op.cit., cat. no. 40 (fig.
2).
On the Palace Museum piece (fig. 1), the red and green
enamels are severely discoloured, probably due to the palace
fire of 1923. The Guimet stem cup is equally said to be fire-
damaged, as is the Eumorfopoulos cup, which shows strong
crazing at the stem.
In the night of 26th June 1923, a notorious fire broke out in the
Prosperity in the Forbidden City, which said to have lasted for
three days and to have burnt down 120 rooms. The Jianfugong
complex, situated at the north-western tip of the Forbidden
City was built by the Qianlong Emperor (r. 1736-95) in 1742.
It is known to have become one of the Emperor’s favourite