Page 322 - Christie's Fine Chinese Paintings March 19 2019 Auction

PROPERTY FROM A PRIVATE COLLECTION,
CALIFORNIA
1815
A PAIR OF LARGE DOUCAI ‘NINE
DRAGON’ VASES, TIANQIUPING
18TH CENTURY
Each vase is decorated with nine sinuous fve-
clawed dragons in various colors, amidst scrolling
clouds and iron-red fames, one emerging from a
band of crashing waves at the foot, all below a ruyi-
head border at the mouth.
22æ in. (57.8 cm.) high
(2)
$150,000-200,000

PROVENANCE
Kunstindustrimuseet, Copenhagen, 1950
(according to labels).
Frank Caro, successor to C.T. Loo, no. 693
(according to labels).
Acquired in Newtown, Massachusetts, 1970s, and
thence by descent to the present owner.
Large-scale eighteenth-century vases decorated
in the doucai palette are very unusual. It is even
more rare to fnd a pair, such as the present lot.
Another rare, large doucai tianqiuping decorated
with a dragon and phoenix from the Sui Yuan
Zhai collection, was sold at Christie’s London, 11
May 2015, lot 32.

The decorative scheme of nine dragons in
diferent writhing positions, centered around a
forward-facing dragon, can be found on other
18th-century vases, such as a green and yellow-
glazed meiping and cover illustrated in The
Complete Collection of Treasures of the Palace
Museum - Miscellaneous Enamelled Porcelains,
Plain Tricoloured Porcelains, Hong Kong, 2009,
pp. 126-29, no. 104, where it is dated to the
Qianlong period. The dragons on the present pair
of vases, however, are rendered in a more spirited
manner than those on the aforementioned
meiping, and display exaggerated, slender necks,
large, confdent claws and energetic poses.

The most prestigious decorative motif seen in
the three-dimensional arts made for the Chinese
imperial court in the Qing dynasty is the Imperial
dragon - the symbol of the Son of Heaven, the
Emperor himself. The horned, fve-clawed, long
dragon is depicted on the present pair nine times;
nine was a number reserved for the emperor -
being the largest single digit number. Dragons
were often specifcally associated with the
number nine and it was believed that the dragon
had nine attributes and also had nine sons. It
was also thought that its body had 117 scales - a
multiple of nine (9 x 13) of which 81 were yang
scales (9 x 9) and 36 were yin scales (9 x 4). This
ritual association between the imperial dragon
and the number nine can be found on imperial
objects across many diferent media.
清十八世紀 鬥彩九龍紋天球瓶一對

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