Page 28 - Sotheby's Speelman Collection Oct. 3, 2018

fig. 1
Cinnabar lacquer table, mark and period of Xuande
© Collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London
圖一
明宣德 剔紅穿花龍鳳紋帶屜案 《大明宣德年製》款
倫敦維多利亞與艾伯特博物館

still unresolved. Lee and Hu have identified over thirty such
pieces, several of which they have ascribed to the Hongwu
period. It is possible that new lacquer pieces could simply not
be provided quickly enough, when the new emperor ascended
the throne, so that existing ones were re-attributed. Whereas
the feeble Yongle mark seen on the cupstand is characteristic
of lacquer ware and is not inscribed in this way on other works
of art, the magnificent Xuande mark on the cupstand follows
the official style of writing seen on Imperial porcelain of the
period and, as Liu Xinyuan noted in, ‘Imperial Porcelain of the
Yongle and Xuande Periods Excavated from the Site of the
Ming Imperial Factory at Jingdezhen’, Imperial Porcelain of
the Yongle and Xuande Periods Excavated from the Site of
the Ming Imperial Factory at Jingdezhen, Hong Kong Museum
of Art, Hong Kong, 1989, pp. 74-75, such Xuande marks were
probably devised by a court calligrapher.
Certainly, the mark on the current lacquer dish fundamentally
differs from those inscribed over Yongle wares. Interestingly,
it is also clear that this particular design of a pair of phoenix
depicted in confrontation with different treatments of their
long tails is a design motif confined to the Xuande period.
This strongly suggests that in contrast to other lacquerwares
traditionally assigned to the Xuande period, which are actually
Hongwu and Yongle examples with later marks, the current
tray is one of the few pieces which can be attributed without
qualification to the Xuande period.

26 SOTHEBY’S 蘇富比