Page 130 - September 20 2021 Chinese Works of Art Bonhams NYC

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PROPERTY FROM THE ROBERT AND MEE-DIN MOORE PROPERTY FROM THE ROBERT AND MEE-DIN MOORE
COLLECTION COLLECTION
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AN ARCHAISTIC PATINATED BRONZE VESSEL, FANG HU AN ARCHAISTIC PATINATED BRONZE VASE, ZUN
Ming/Qing dynasty Ming dynasty, 15th/17th century
Under a dark coppery patination and superbly cast in the Eastern Under a black lacquer patination, the sturdy vessel cast with four
Zhou style with the bulbous body divided into quarters by relief vertical notched flanges in three bands to the body, neck, and foot,
strapwork bands and centered by bosses on a whorl and leiwen the central section cast in relief with running lions divided by the
ground, vertical flanges to the narrow sides and small tapir-like animal- flanges.
mask loop handles at the neck. 11in (28cm) high
7 ¼in (18.4cm) high
$1,200 - 1,800
$2,000 - 3,000
明 十五至十七世紀 銅尊
明/清 銅方壺
The vase-shaped zun 尊 was popular during the Early Western Zhou
For another seventeenth century version of this Eastern Zhou inspired period and became a generic name for bronze wine vessels. It was
vessel, see Christian Deydier, Chinese Bronzes, Friborg, Switzerland, written as a pictograph in oracle bone and bronze inscriptions, and
1980, p.188, no. 147. For the early Zhou antecedent, a you, see ibid., depicts two hands holding a wine jar. Song scholars began to use the
pp. 52-53, no. 33. name indiscriminately for a number of different vessels, including gu,
zhi, hu, and lei. The zun category covers two distinguishable types:
one has an angular shoulder and a trumpet-shaped mouth; the other
is in the shape of a tall vase.

For another zun-form archaistic bronze vessel dated to the Ming
dynasty, see Sotheby’s, Hong Kong, Later Chinese Bronzes From the
Collection of Ulrich Hausmann, 8 October 2014, lot 3360.

The same form was also particularly popular in the fifteenth century
Imperial cloisonné workshops, see Sir Harry Garner, Chinese and
Japanese Cloisonné enamels, London, 1960, no. 18.

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