Page 101 - Mounted Oriental Porcelain Getty Museum

I 8. BOWL

THE PORCELAIN: Chinese (Yongzheng), 172,3-35
THE GILT-BRONZE MOUNTS: French, circa 1750-55
HEIGHT: I ft., Z1/! in. (36.9 cm); WIDTH: i ft., 4% in. (41.2 cm); DEPTH: n in. (27.9 cm)

72.01.42

DESCRIPTION FlG. ISA
The deep, thickly potted oviform bowl has a clear
pale gray glaze, with a fine dark gray crackle and a faint larly glazed vase, with later mounts, is in the James A.
secondary golden crackle (fig. i8A). It is richly mounted de Rothschild Collection at Waddesdon Manor, En-
around the rim and the foot with scrolled, foliated, and gland.2 A similarly mounted bowl of enameled famille
pierced gilt bronze. At each side a tall scrolling handle rose porcelain was sold in Paris in 1971.3 The mounts
(fig. iSB) of gilt-bronze acanthus leaves entwined with of all these vases were probably made by the same
flowers and berries links the rim to the foot, clasping the fondeur-ciseleur.
lower part of the bowl (fig. i8c). The foot ring of the
bowl has been ground down to accommodate it to a The shape of the rim mount might suggest at first
tall, gilt-bronze base of scrolling acanthus that forms the sight that this bowl was originally lidded. The shape of
four feet (fig. 180). It is pierced with a band of ovaloes. the handles, however, makes it impossible to insert a lid.

MARKS None. Porcelaine grise is very rarely mentioned in the
Livre-journal of Lazare Duvaux, and most of the refer-
COMMENTARY ences to gray porcelain are clearly European; however,
A cluster of berries at the junction of the handle Madame de Pompadour brought to the shop for repair
and the bowl is missing on one side. The porcelain is on June 12,1753: "Une... garniture deporcelainegrise,
cracked beneath one of the handles. Approximately half garnie partie en or & partie en argent dore remise a
an inch of the rim has been ground away to accommo- neuf."* Such rich mounting would have been applied
date the upper mount. only to rare and highly prized Chinese porcelain.
Monochrome crackle porcelains such as this were
inspired by the classic Kuan and Ko wares of the twelfth-
century Song dynasty. The celadon glaze was applied
over a black or dark gray body before the piece was fired
in a reducing kiln; the variations in the crackle and glaze
color were achieved by changes in the firing cycle. The
crackle itself is due to a difference in the coefficient of
expansion between the body and the glaze, so that in
cooling, the tensions created caused the cracks to appear.
This type of ceramic ware was accidentally discovered at
the southern Song kilns five hundred years earlier.
A porcelain bowl with a gray-crackled glaze, but
lacking the gilt-bronze handles and the mount around
the rim, was formerly in the Wrightsman Collection at
the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.1 A simi-

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