Page 170 - Chiense works of art sothebys march 14 2017 nyc

646
PROPERTY FROM THE BERGER COLLECTION EDUCATIONAL
TRUST, SOLD TO BENEFIT FUTURE PHILANTHROPY
A RARE INSCRIBED ‘DING’ FOUR-LEGGED
CENSER
YUAN DYNASTY, DATED ZHIYUAN 22ND
YEAR, CORRESPONDING TO 1285
of square section, the gently bilobed sides of the vessel
rising to a short recessed waist and upright galleried rim with
indented corners, all supported on four cabriole legs in the
shape of four-clawed feet issuing from monster-masks, the
lobes carved with a slightly recessed taotie mask centered on
the vessel’s corners and patterned with granulation, the neck
incised with classic scroll, the outer face of the rim incised with thirty-second year of Khubilai Khan’s zhiyuan reign period
the characters xiang hua gong yang (presenting incense and
owers) amid cloud scrolls, the white body covered in a clear
glaze pooling to an ivory tint in the recesses, the underside of
the body incised with the characters Zhiyuan er shi er nian san
yue ri zao (made in the third month of the twenty-second year
of Zhiyuan)
Height 4½ in., 11.4 cm
PROVENANCE
English Private Collection.
Sotheby’s London, 10th June 1997, lot 15.
Collection of Bernadette and William M. B. Berger, Denver,
Colorado, acquired in 1997.
$ 20,000-30,000
1997 6 10 15
Bernadette William M B Berger
1997
168 SOTHEBY’S
No other Dingyao incense burner of related form or design
appears to have been published. Any dated Ding wares are
extremely rare, as are Ding wares dateable to the Yuan dynasty
in general.
To judge from the inscription xiang hua gong yang, a phrase
borrowed from the Diamond Sutra, the piece was probably
commissioned together with a pair of ower vases to be
donated to a Buddhist temple to commemorate a special
occasion.
Tong Yihua lists another white incense burner with animal-
mask design in the Zhongguo lidai taoci kuanshi huiji, Hong
Kong, 1984, p. 54, with the same inscription but dated to the
(equivalent to 1295), which in fact was the rst year of his
grandson’s reign, a year after his death, as well as a white
ower vase dated equivalent to 1282.
Another Ding piece dated to the Yuan dynasty is a very large
vase with xed ring handles from the Eumorfopoulos collection,
now in the British Museum, illustrated in Hobson, The George
Eumorfopoulos Collection Catalogue of Chinese, Corean and
Persian Pottery and Porcelain, vol. 3, 1926, pl. XXVII, no. C132,
which is dated by an ink inscription in accordance with 1350.
In the Yuan dynasty, ceramic altar vessels of bronze form
were made by various kilns, particularly those at Longquan
and Jingdezhen, yet it is rare to nd a Ding piece so closely
imitating a contemporary metal incense burner. This censer
shares its square quatrefoil lobed form with a bronze censer
of the same period, perhaps also with related archaistic
decoration (degraded), recovered from a ship wrecked o
the coast of Korea around 1323, and included in the Special
Exhibition of Cultural Relics Found o the Sinan Coast, National
Museum of Korea, Seoul, 1977, cat. no. 270.
The dating of this lot is consistent with the result of a
thermoluminescence test, Oxford sample no. B66j10.