Page 68 - Sothebys Important Chinese Art London May 2018

This bowl is a Þ ne example of Ding ware, evident in its
masterful potting, swiftly and conÞ dently carved design and
exquisite glaze. Ding ware is renowned for their thin potting
and Þ ne white body, which does not require a coat of slip to
appear white after Þ ring, which was covered in a transparent
ivory coloured glaze. Potted into elegant forms, some of which
derived from contemporaneous silver and lacquer shapes,
many others – like the present form – were independently
developed by the potters, and found favour with the court
and wealthy monasteries during the Northern Song and Jin
(1115-1234) periods. Due to the fragility of their thinly potted
body that was prone to warping during the potting and Þ ring
stages, Ding bowls of this type often measure around 22 cm in
diameter.
The restrained, yet ß owing lines of the carved decoration
successfully capture the spirit and grace of the lotus ß ower,
like brush strokes in contemporary ink painting, while
accentuating the reÞ ned quality of the porcelain body.
Symbolic of purity and integrity as it rises clean out of muddy
waters, the lotus was a popular motif throughout the Song
dynasty (960-1279) due to the Confucian value of personal
virtue, and frequently appeared on white-glazed Ding wares,
whose pure glaze tone enhances the ß ower’s message.
A bowl of this type, in the Palace Museum, is illustrated in
Selection of Ding Ware. The Palace Museum’s Collection and
Archaeological Excavation, Beijing, 2012, pl. 64; another, from
the Alfred Schoenlicht collection was sold in these rooms, 13
th
th
December 1955, lot 58, and again, 14 December 1971, lot 194;
nd
and a fourth was sold in our Hong Kong rooms, 2 May 2000,
th
lot 588 and again in these rooms, 16 May 2012, lot 88.
The skilfully applied copper band on the current bowl is
representative of the popular taste of the time. The well-known
record in a Song text that the court did not appreciate Ding
wares because of their unglazed rims, and ordered wares from
the Ru kilns instead, has been discussed by Ts’ai Mei-fen of the
National Palace Museum, Taipei, at a symposium organized
by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in 1996. She
argued that unglazed rims were not the consequence of the
kilns’ practice of Þ ring bowls upside down, but that ‘the reason
for the unglazed rim was that the metal-banded rim was the
popular taste of the time’, approved even at court, and that
‘the practice of covering edges … began well before the Ting
[Ding] kiln started Þ ring its ware upside down. The practice
was not introduced to cover up the unglazed rim, but, on the
contrary, the unglazed rim was possibly instituted because of
the popular practices of decorating edges’. She states that the
Wensiyuan (Crafts Institute), a workshop for the production
of jewellery under the Directorate for Imperial Manufactories,
as well as the Houyuan Zaozuosuo (Palace Workshop of the
Rear Garden), another workshop that produced articles for
use in the inner court, both included a Lengzuo workshop,
for the ‘decoration of edges’. Ts’ai suggests therefore that
the quote does not refer to imperial taste but to the fact that
metal-bound vessels were not considered suitable for certain
imperial ritual ceremonies. See Ts’ai Mei-fen, ‘A Discussion of
Ting Ware with Unglazed Rims and Related Twelfth-Century
O* cial Porcelain’, Arts of the Sung and Yüan, The Metropolitan
Museum of Art, New York, 1996, pp. 109-31.

66 SOTHEBY’S