Page 111 - 2019 September 12th Christie's New York Chiense Art Masterpieces of Chinese Gold and Silver

Fig. 1 Pierced censer, Chinese, Tang dynasty (618-906 CE). Beaten silver, overall:
2 inches (5.1 cm). The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri.
Gift of Dr. Otto Burchard, 46-17. Photo courtesy Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art,
Media Services / John Lamberton

A censer of this type unearthed in 1970, Hejiacun, Xi’an, Shaanxi province, is illustrated in Selected
Treasures from Hejiacun Tang Hoard, Shaanxi History Museum, Wenwu, 2003, pp. 222-25. and
again by Carol Michaelson in Gilded Dragons: Buried Treasures from China’s Golden Ages, British
Museum, 1999, pp. 111-12, no. 73. The author notes that four censers of this type were also found in
the hoard at the Famen Temple, also near Xi’an. Other censers of this type with related decoration
include one in the William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art, Kansas City, illustrated by Jan Fontein
and Tung Wu in Unearthing China’s Past, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 1973, p. 178, no. 91
(Fig. 1); one formerly in the Hakutsuru Art Museum, included in the exhibition, Tang, Eskenazi,
London, 1987, no. 1; and one in the collection of Pierre Uldry illustrated in Chinesisches Gold und
Silber, Zurich, 1994, no. 201. The design on these censers is diferent from that of the present
example, which refects the variation of designs that can be found on censers of this type.
For further discussion of silver censers of this type and their gimbaled mechanism,
see the footnote to lot 540.

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