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1487

                A RARE AND LARGE SANCAI-GLAZED POTTERY FIGURE OF
                A COURT LADY
                TANG DYNASTY (AD 618-907)

                The elegant, slender lady is shown standing with her hands
                clasped beneath the folds of the long straw-glazed shawl that is
                draped over her shoulders and falls down the front of the long,
                rich green skirt that drapes over the tops of her amber slippers
                and is secured with a long amber sash tied with a bow in back
                that falls from under her short, vivid amber jacket to the base.
                Her unglazed, full-cheeked face is modeled with crisp features
                and detailed in black and red pigments, and her black-painted
                hair is drawn up into an elaborate topknot.

                14¡ in. (36.6 cm.) high.

                $30,000-50,000

                PROVENANCE

                Sotheby’s New York, 3 June 1987, lot 122.

                LITERATURE

                Arts of Asia, May/June 1987, p. 21.

                A similar fgure with the same hair style and of comparable height
                (35.8 cm. high) is illustrated in Chinese Ceramics in the Idemitsu
                Collection, Tokyo, 1987, pl. 352 (15 in. high), and another is illustrated
                by Yutaka Mino and J. Robinson in Beauty and Tranquility: The Eli Lilly
                Collection of Chinese Art, Indianapolis Museum of Art, 1983, pp. 178-
                79, pl. 63, where the authors illustrate a section of a wall painting in
                the tomb of Princess Yongtai, AD 706, at Liangshan, Qianxian, Shaanxi
                province, which depicts ladies dressed and coifed in a manner similar
                to that of the both the Lilly and present fgure. See, also, the similar
                fgure illustrated by E. Schloss in Ming-Ch’i; Clay Figures Refecting
                Life in Ancient China, The Katonah Gallery, Katonah, New York,
                12 April - 29 June 1975, no. 98, where Schloss suggests that she
                represents a foreign court lady, perhaps of Turkic or Persian type. Each
                of these fgures wears ‘cloud’ shoes, rather than the simpler slippers of
                the present fgure.

                The result of Oxford thermoluminescence test no. 466h94 is
                consistent with the dating of this lot.
                唐 三彩女俑

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