Page 154 - Bonhams Wen Tang Collectiont, October 2014 Hong Kong

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171 Tea-leaf-pattern bowls, muye wenyang wan or shuye tuyang wan, are
A very fine and rare small Jizhou ‘tea-leaf- among the most renowned ceramics made for tea use at the Jizhou
pattern’ tea bowl kilns. The distinct leaf patterns were produced by applying a leaf to the
Southern Song Dynasty interior of a bowl and then covering the bowl in a dark brown glaze.
Potted with wide flaring sides rising to a narrow finger groove and an When fired, the leaf turns transparent, leaving an impression of the leaf
everted mouth rim, covered overall in a lustrous brown-black glaze, structure usually pale yellow in colour. It is rare to find an example of a
the interior decorated with an unusually precise and clearly-defined bowl with such a clearly defined leaf.
applied buff-coloured leaf revealing all its veins.
10.7cm diam. Two examples of bowls similarly decorated, the first from the collection
of The Art Institute of Chicago and the second from the Arthur M.
HK$600,000 - 800,000 Sackler Museum, Harvard University, are illustrated by Robert Mowry in
US$77,000 - 100,000 Hare’s Fur, Tortoiseshell, and Partridge Feathers: Chinese Brown and
Black-Glazed Ceramics, 400-1400, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1996,
南宋 吉州窯黑釉木葉盞 pp.259-62, no.107 and 108. Another bowl of high quality and similar
size, formerly in the YiQingGe Collection of Chinese Ceramics, was
sold at Christie’s Hong Kong, 29 May 2013, lot 2003.

152 | Bonhams