Page 182 - Sotheby's Speelman Collection Oct. 3, 2018

Jiajing period cloisonné enamelled bowls of this form are
extremely rare, with only a small number preserved in
museum and private collections. For a slightly smaller bowl of
similar form in the National Palace Museum, Taipei, decorated
to the exterior with lotus flowers and to the interior with a
galloping horse encircled by lions, see Enamel Ware in the
Ming and Ch’ing Dynasties, Taipei, 1999, pl. 8. See also a
bowl decorated with fish in the Uldry Collection, housed in the
Rietberg Museum, Zurich, illustrated by Helmut Brinker and
Albert Lutz, Chinese Cloisonne: The Pierre Uldry Collection,
Zurich, 1988, cat. no. 33.
A Jiajing reign-marked cloisonné enamel bowl of this form,
similarly decorated on the interior with a shou character
surrounded by cranes in flight, in the Museé des Arts
Décoratifs, Paris, is illustrated in Cloisonné. Chinese Enamels
from the Yuan, Ming and Qing Dynasties, Bard Graduate
Centre, New York, 2011, pl. 6.16, together with a bowl
enamelled with a pair of fishes in the interior, pl. 4.13, and two
boxes decorated with Daoist immortals, pls 6.15 and 7.12.
For figural decoration of similar composition on cloisonné
enamel, see that on a gu-form vase in the Palace Museum,
Beijing, illustrated in Compendium of Collections in the Palace
Museum, Enamels, vol. 1, Beijing, 2011, no. 129.
Pengliang Lu in ‘Beyond the Women’s Quarters. Meaning and
Function of Cloisonné in the Ming and Qing Dynasties’, op. cit.,
p. 66, notes that bowls decorated both on the exterior and
interior were used during ritual ceremonies.
For a closely related counterpart in porcelain, revealing the
close dialogue between the imperial enamel workshops and
porcelain kilns at Jingdezhen, see a Jiajing reign-marked bowl
sold in these rooms, 10th April 2006, lot 1674.

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