Page 242 - Bonhams Catalog Cohen and Cohen Jan 24, 2023 New York

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A VERY RARE LARGE FAMILLE ROSE ‘EUROPEAN six such efforts undertaken between 1655 and 1685. Illustrations of
embassies by the Dutch author Johannes Nieuhof (1618-1672) were
PROCESSION’ PUNCH BOWL
Qianlong period, circa 1740 very influential in the West.
Boldly enameled all around the exterior with a continuous scene of
Western figures on horseback crossing a green grassy area, fancifully Nieuhof visited China in 1655 on a Dutch trade mission to the court
dressed in a range of somewhat old-fashioned-looking Western formal of the Chinese Emperor, newly installed after the very damaging
clothing and all mounted on multi-colored horses, the center of the invasion and ensuing civil war which had more or less ended only a
interior with a roundel of exotic flowers beneath a border of flowers. decade earlier. Clearly the Dutch VOC interpreted this cataclysmic
15 1/2in (39cm) diam political change as an opportunity to establish a more profitable trading
relationship with the new rulers in Beijing and minimize or eliminate the
$15,000 - 20,000 longer-established Portuguese (based since the 1550s in Macao) as
trading competitors with the Middle Kingdom. His accounts of the trip
乾隆時期 約1740年 粉彩《歐洲人物遊行圖》潘趣酒碗 and description of China were initially published in Amsterdam in 1665
as ‘An embassy from the East-India Company of the United Provinces
to the Grand Tartar Cham, emperor of China’. It was accompanied by
Published:
Cohen & Cohen, The Golden Gate Collection, Antwerp, 2018, pp. illustrations based on first-hand observations. Nieuhof’s Dutch account
190-191, no. 140 was thereafter translated into French, German, English, and Latin; and
the illustrations were widely reproduced at mixed levels of printing skill,
出版： the images sometimes appearing back to front. The information that
倫敦Cohen & Cohen古董行，《The Golden Gate Collection》，安特 ‘An Embassy...’ contained subsequently formed the intellectual basis
衛普，2018年，頁190-191，圖版編號140 for much ‘Chinoiserie’ design in the West.
The scene on this extraordinary and very rare ‘European subject’ References: compare with the procession subject in Kina Slott,
bowl may depict a Dutch embassy on horseback, a composition Drottningholm, Sweden, depicted on an even larger fish tank with the
possibly inspired by Chinese scroll paintings of diplomatic missions, same decoration, illustrated by Gyllensvärd, 1990, 124; and the only
with a propaganda subtext of ‘expected supplication’. The Dutch sent other published version of this famous subject on a similar punchbowl,
embassies to break the Portuguese monopoly on trade, with at least formerly in the Mottahedeh Collection, illustrated by Howard & Ayers,
1978, no. 229.

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