Page 220 - Christies Fine Chinese Works of Art March 2016 New York
P. 220
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
(reverse)
218