Page 50 - Bonhams Fine Chinese Art Nov 2013 London

Bluett and Sons, June 1929 (catalogue cover) The present lot can fairly be said to epitomise much of the stylistic
The Liddell moonflask, Lot 36
A blue and white and underglaze copper-red
moonflask, Qianlong seal mark and period;
image courtesy of the Palace Museum, Beijing proportioned neck and foot, to the strongly delineated deep
achievements in porcelain production during the Qianlong period.
From the smooth white body, perfectly formed in a softly flattened
‘moon’ shape, complemented by the delicate handles and perfectly
copper-red five-clawed dragon emerging from dramatically rolling
and splashing waves, and the technical perfection of the painting,
enamelling and control of the glaze during firing, the vase embodies
the Imperial style. As a symbol the Emperor himself, the dragon is a
most fitting subject for a vase destined to grace one of the halls of an
Imperial palace.
The moonflask is particularly unusual for the even turquoise glaze
covering the ground but stopping neatly at the copper-red and
underglaze blue painting. It appears that only two other ‘dragon’
moonflasks with this distinctive turquoise glaze are known; one
offered at Christie’s London, 16 December 1981, lot 96, and also
illustrated by A.du Boulay, Christie’s Pictorial History of Chinese
Ceramics, Oxford, 1984, pp.212-213, no.5, and another (although
not inconceivably the same vase) sold at Sotheby’s Hong Kong, 20
May 1981, lot 775. Given the extreme rarity of this type of vase, it
seems possible that the present lot would have been made as the
pair to one of these examples.
Not only is the turquoise glaze of the present lot extraordinarily rare,
but indeed only a handful of other ‘dragon’ moonflasks with a related
coloured glaze appear to exist: one is the yellow-glazed example
also acquired by Captain Liddell and included in the same Bluett’s
exhibition The Liddell Collection of Old Chinese Porcelain, Bluett
and Sons, London, June 1929, no.207 alongside the present lot;
and another vase with a lime-green-glaze formerly in the E.Chow
Collection was sold at Sotheby’s Hong Kong, The Edward T.Chow
Collection, Part One, 25 November 1980, lot 151. This same vase
from the E.Chow Collection was subsequently illustrated on the cover
of M.Beurdeley and G.Raindre, Qing Porcelain: Famille Verte, Famille
Rose, London, 1987.
Besides these few examples of coloured-glazed ‘dragon’
moonflasks, a small number of similar vases decorated only with
underglaze blue and copper-red are also extant. One is the third vase
from the Liddell Collection, also included in the Bluett’s exhibition
The Liddell Collection of Old Chinese Porcelain, Bluett and Sons,
London, June 1929, no.207. One from the Norton Collection was
exhibited in 1965, Exhibition of Chinese Ceramics, no.116 and is
now in the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, purchased in
1964, accession no.EC.1.1964. Another from the Palace Museum
in Beijing is illustrated in The Complete Collection of Treasures of the
Palace Museum: Blue and White Porcelain with Underglazed Red (III),
Hong Kong, 2000, no.213, and another in the Tsui Museum of Art is
illustrated by Yang Boda, The Tsui Museum of Art: Chinese Ceramics
IV: Qing Dynasty, Hong Kong, 1995, no.84. Finally, Soame Jenyns
illustrates another example, from the Collection of Gerald Reitlinger,
in Later Chinese Porcelain, London, 1971, pl.XCIV, fig.1.