Page 71 - 2020 Sept Important Chinese Art Sotheby's NYC Asia Week

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

Catalogue Note
Exuding understated elegance characteristic of the Yongzheng period, the present dish is covered in a luminous clair-de-lune glaze
inspired by the celebrated Ru wares of the Song dynasty. This high-fired glaze, with a cobalt content of about 1%, was first
produced by the imperial kilns in Jingdezhen during the Kangxi Emperor’s reign. Known in the West by the nineteenth-century
French connoisseurs’ term clair-de-lune (‘moon light’), and in China as tianlan (‘sky blue’), it was one of the most successful
monochrome glazes created in Jingdezhen during the Kangxi reign and reserved exclusively for imperial porcelains, remaining
popular throughout the Qing dynasty.

A pair of closely related dishes from the Zhuyuetang Collection was included in the exhibition A Millennium of Monochromes from
the Great Tang to the High Qing. The Baur and Zhuyuetang Collections, Baur Foundation, Geneva, 2018, cat. no. 88; a dish in the
Nanjing Museum is published in The Official Kiln Porcelain of the Chinese Qing Dynasty, Shanghai, 2003, p. 208; and another pair
from the Sir Percival David Collection and now in the British Museum, London, is included in Illustrated Catalogue of Ming and Qing
Monochrome Wares in the Percival David Foundation of Chinese Art, London, 1989, no. B560-1. A Yongzheng mark and period dish
of slightly larger size, but with rounded sides, was sold twice in these rooms, 10th-11th October 1962, lot 122, and again,
12th September 2018, lot 128, from the collection of Aron and Elizabeth Landauer.

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