Page 110 - Fine Chinese Ceramics Sept 2016

PROPERTY FROM A PRIVATE MIDWEST COLLECTION

1306
A VERY RARE CIZHOU-TYPE BLACK AND RUSSET ‘PARTRIDGE
FEATHER’-GLAZED VASE
NORTHERN SONG-JIN DYNASTY, 12TH CENTURY
The vase is covered with a lustrous blackish-brown glaze liberally splashed in russet with
‘partridge feather mottles’ that falls in an irregular line above the spreading foot to expose
the pale grey body.
11 in. (28 cm.) high
$60,000-80,000

PROVENANCE

Mrs. C. P. Wilson Collection.
Warren E. Cox, New York.

LITERATURE

Warren E. Cox, The Book of Pottery and Porcelain, vol. I, New York, 1944, p. 181, pl. 54.

The bold russet splashes accenting the blackish-brown glaze on this exceptional vase
are often referred to as zhegu ban, or ‘partridge-feather mottles’. In his discussion of
a russet-splashed black-glazed meiping in the Art Institute of Chicago, R. D. Mowry
in Hare’s Fur, Tortoiseshell, and Partridge Feathers: Chinese Brown- and Black-Glazed
Ceramics, 400-1400, Harvard University Art Museums, 1996, pp. 137-8, no. 35, notes
that the “term, zhegu ban (partridge-feather mottles) appears in texts of the mid-tenth
century to describe ceramics with mottled decoration.” He further notes that the larger
“partridge-feather mottles”, of the type seen on the Chicago meiping and the present
vase “began to appear in dark-glazed Cizhou-type wares in the eleventh century”.

A very similar vase of comparable height (11¿ in.), from the Alfred Shoenlicht Collection,
was sold at Christie’s New York, 20 September 2002, lot 288, and another of smaller size
(21 cm.) is illustrated in Mayuyama, Seventy Years, Vol. 1, Tokyo, 1976, p. 189, pl. 563.
北宋/金 磁州窯黑釉鐵銹斑卷口瓶

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