Page 40 - Ming Porcelain Auction March 14, 2017 Sotheby's, NYC

38 SOTHEBY’S NEW YORK 14 MARCH 2017 MING: THE INTERVENTION OF IMPERIAL TASTE

2 Chinese Ceramics

White in Yuan and Ming Dynasties, Tokyo, 1995, with the opposite side illustrated Highlights from the Sir Percival David
as col. pl. 43; both sides are also illustrated as reference gures in the exhibition
catalogue Jingdezhen Zhushan chutu Yongle guanyao ciqi [Yongle Imperial Collection 2009 28
porcelain excavated at Zhushan, Jingdezhen], Capital Museum, Beijing, 2007,
p. 15, g. 3, by Ma Wenkuan, who characterizes its decoration as being “of pure 59 Riza yi Abbasi
and fresh beauty and excellence, great in elegance and serenity”.
612 14
The designs on both asks are clearly based on the same draft, and vary only 1 1977
slightly in detail. While the carnations are similarly, perhaps somewhat more
freely, rendered on the present piece than on the Topkapi Saray ask, the
layout of the asters is here more compact, with some small leaves on the outer
edges omitted to create a more concise composition. The Topkapi Saray ask
bears two drilled owners’ marks on the base, one consisting of three dots very
similar to the mark on the present ask, the other probably representing Arabic
writing, but illegible. Such marks were applied particularly in Iran to early Ming
porcelains, and both asks may have come from China directly to Iran in the
Yongle period before being separated and one ending up in Turkey.

Only one other Yongle moon ask is similarly decorated to echo a fan painting,
the famous ask in the Sir Percival David Collection in the British Museum,
which depicts birds on owering branches between curling cloud motifs; it is
equally reproduced in numerous publications, for example, in Regina Krahl and
Jessica Harrison-Hall, Chinese Ceramics. Highlights from the Sir Percival David
Collection, London, 2009, no. 28 and p. 59 ( g. 3). A moon ask of the same
design appears in a painting by Iran’s most famous painter Riza-yi ‘Abbasi (c.
1565-1635), court painter under the Safavid Shah ‘Abbas I (r. 1587-1629), who
donated the Safavid royal collection of Chinese porcelains to the Ardebil Shrine.

Only two further asks, one also in the Topkapi Saray Museum, the other in
the National Palace Museum, Taipei, are comparable in size and status, both
showing the same supporting designs of upright petals on the neck and petal
panels at the shoulder and foot, but are decorated in between with foreign