Page 55 - Ming Porcelain Auction March 14, 2017 Sotheby's, NYC

Fig. 1 A large brown and white Fig. 2 A large blue and white ‘peony’
reserve-decorated ‘peony’ dish, dish, Xuande mark and period
Xuande mark and period © Jingdezhen Ceramics Archaeology
© Jingdezhen Ceramics Archaeology Institute
Institute

©
©

2 2007 3 50

the Jingdezhen imperial kilns equally in cobalt-blue on white, in iron-brown on 8 1999 144
white, and in cobalt-blue against a yellow background, very similarly conceived 2004 11 10 590
in all versions, with even the fruit sprays distributed around the center in
the same order and at the same coordinates; rejected examples of all three 1994 2010 4 1667
styles from the imperial kiln site were included in the exhibition Jingdezhen
chutu Ming Xuande guanyao ciqi/Xuande Imperial Porcelain Excavated at 35
Jingdezhen, Chang Foundation, Taipei, 1998, cat. nos 85-1 to 85-3 ( gs 1-3); and 82 3
a successfully red example with this design in a very pale café-au-lait color is
in the Shanghai Museum, see Lu Minghua, Shanghai Bowuguan zangpin yanjiu 29
daxi/Studies of the Shanghai Museum Collections: A Series of Monographs. 198
Mingdai guanyao ciqi [Ming imperial porcelain], Shanghai, 2007, pl. 3-50 ( g. 4).

Only about a dozen related Xuande dishes are known, all except one of
smaller size. The one larger dish is a broken piece in the Meiyintang collection,
illustrated in Sekai bijutsu taizenshū /New History of World Art: Tōyō hen
[Oriental section], vol. 8: Min [Ming], Tokyo, 1999, pl. 144, sold in our London
rooms, 10th November 2004, lot 590, and published in Regina Krahl, Chinese
Ceramics from the Meiyintang Collection, London, 1994-2010, vol. 4, no. 1667.

The waste heaps of the Jingdezhen kiln sites also brought to light sherds of a
somewhat smaller dish (35 cm) decorated with a daylily – a pattern, of which
no perfect example appears to survive – which was exhibited in reconstructed
form at the Chang Foundation, Taipei, 1998, op.cit., cat. no. 82-3.

1998