Page 12 - Sotheby's October 3 2017 Three Masterpieces
P. 12
DRAGONS FROM A
LONDON COLLECTOR
REGINA KRAHL
The three pieces presented here have been selected from a collection student of the arts of China, and elected to the Council of the OCS, he
originally assembled mainly in London, over several decades. London has collected across a spectrum of Asian art, but ultimately focussed on what
been the undisputed centre of collecting Chinese works of art for most he considered masterpieces. Unusually for his peer group, he combined
of the twentieth century, a development reflected in the establishment of an aesthetic sensibility with a mind for scientific inquiry, and undertook
the Oriental Ceramic Society (OCS) in 1921. The Society brought together his own investigations into ceramics at facilities afforded to him at the
collectors and museum curators with a common interest in, love of and Research Laboratory for Archaeology at the University of Oxford.
curiosity about Chinese antiques, a field about which little was known at
the time. A first wave of enthusiasm for Asian works of art in the 1920s The three pieces here assembled – very different in style and medium –
and ‘30s culminated in the organization of the world’s largest exhibition have much more in common than their dragon decoration: they are united
of Chinese art ever mounted, at the Royal Academy of Arts in 1935/6. This by their high quality, by the fact that all three can be ranked at the top of
was followed by a second wave in the ‘50s and ‘60s, when the present their respective categories, and that, accordingly, they are all extremely
collector discovered his passion for Asian art, around the same time that rare. The superb blue-and-white jar made for the Xuande Emperor (r. 1426-
Roger Pilkington assembled his exquisite collection, largely sold in these 1435) by the imperial porcelain workshops at Jingdezhen, is delightfully
rooms in April 2016. painted with soft brush strokes in a bright, vivid cobalt blue. It displays the
charming, almost playful manner of this early Ming reign, where imperial
The mid-century was also the time when some of the major OCS exhibi- designs were not yet circumscribed by official dictates. The cloisonné
tions were mounted, on The Arts of the Sung Dynasty, The Arts of the Ming tianqiuping, although unmarked, embodies the classic translation of an
Dynasty, The Arts of the Qing Dynasty, on Chinese Blue and White Porcelain, ancient design into a contemporary style that was one of the trademarks
Fourteenth to Nineteenth Centuries, on Polychrome Porcelain of Ming and of imperial production under the aegis of the Yongzheng Emperor (r. 1723-
Manchu Dynasties, etc. London was the pre-eminent location to study 1735). For a pattern to be transferred not only into a new period but also
Chinese art, since it boasted world-class public collections, to which the into a different medium, as in this case, is particularly unusual. Finally, the
Percival David Foundation was added in 1952, as well as leading scholars in baroque opulence of the wooden box manifests the patronage of the Qian-
these museums. For a collector, London was the most rewarding hunting long Emperor (r. 1736-1795) at its zenith. The ‘naturalistic’ carving in subtle
ground as, in addition to the constant stream of sales held by the major graded reliefs brings dragon and phoenix to life as is rarely the case with
auction houses, it was home to renowned and energetic dealers such as this formal motif, and the exacting standard of its execution documents
Bluett & Sons, Spink & Son, and Sparks. the bravura of the imperial workshops. To appreciate the very different
imperial tastes reflected in these three objects required an open-minded,
It was this setting that provided both the original inspiration and the sensitive and knowledgeable connoisseurship – qualities that perfectly
opportunity for the collector of the present three pieces. An assiduous describe this collector.
