Page 308 - 2020 Sept Important Chinese Art Sotheby's NYC Asia Week

9/2/2020 Important Chinese Art | Sotheby's

Catalogue Note
The graceful lines of this sumptuous attenuated form are made all the more luxurious by the effect of the luminous glaze over the
lushly foliate-carved layer of moon-white slip. The transparent glaze glides over the carved surface and pools in the recesses,
highlighting the three registers of carved decoration that conform perfectly to the sinuous form. A vase of similar form, impressive
height and nearly identical decoration is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York and illustrated in Ceramics of the Liao
Dynasty, China Institute in America, New York 1973. cat. no. 29.

Another closely related example, but of slightly smaller size and carved in the more usual manner to reveal the buff pottery body,
is in the Freer Sackler Museum, Washington D.C., and illustrated in several books including, Freedom of Clay and Brush Through
Seven Centuries in Northern China: Tz'u-Chou Type Wares, 960-1600 A.D., Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis, 1980 cat. no.
14. The Freer Sackler vase is illustrated again along with another of this more common type sold at Christie's New York, 18th-19th
March 2009, lot 508. For a further related vase of the same form and decoration but more roughly incised, see the example
excavated from a Liao tomb in Liaoning province now preserved in the Liaoning Provincial Museum, illustrated in Zhongguo taoci
quanji [Complete Series of Chinese Ceramics], vol. 9, Shanghai, 2000, pl. 3.

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