Page 118 - Christies Asia Week 2015 Chinese Works of Art

PROPERTY FROM AN IMPORTANT AMERICAN COLLECTION
2078
A LARGE CLOISONNÉ ENAMEL LOBED BASIN
KANGXI-YONGZHENG PERIOD (1662-1735)

The basin has circular sides and is decorated in the interior with fve Buddhist lions around
a brocade ball and interspersed with four of the Eight Treasures including a coin, a lozenge,
pairs of rhinoceros horns and a ‘faming pearl’ against a dense ground of cloud motifs. In
the well are six sea horses leaping above waves breaking against jagged rocks. The everted
hexalobed rim is decorated with shaped panels of frontal dragons reserved on a trellis-pattern
ground. The exterior is decorated with four shaped cartouches containing two dragons
fanking a stylized shou character below scrolling lotus on the underside of the rim, which is
repeated on the base. The whole is raised on a separate gilt-bronze stand with three elephant-
head feet.
21º in. (54 cm.) diam., stand

$60,000-80,000

PROVENANCE:

Christopher Bruckner, London.

The decoration on this basin has been carefully designed to maximize its auspicious symbolism. The
lion in Chinese art is associated with power, offcial high rank or tutelage. The combination of lions
playing with brocade balls amidst the Eight Treasures in the interior symbolizes the wishes for power
and wealth. On the broad rim are mountains and waves. The mountains represent the mythical
‘southern mountains of longevity’ which rise from the ‘sea of blessings’. To further emphasize the
notion of longevity, pairs of dragons with bodies made up by wish-granting scrolls fanking the shou
character within panels decorate the exterior. The overall decoration thus represents a wish for power,
wealth, longevity, fortune and for all one’s wishes to be granted.
An almost identical basin is in the Pierre Uldry Collection, which the author compares to another
six-lobed example in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It is believed that these basins were used
as washbasins in the palace chambers, including a mother-of-pearl-inlaid example supported on a
wooden stand in the Chuxiugong, ‘Palace of Pervading Elegance’, The Forbidden Palace. See Chinese
Cloisonné: The Pierre Uldry Collection, New York, 1989, pl. 177 and text p. 123. Another example was
sold at Christie’s Hong Kong, The Imperial Sale, 1 June 2011, lot 3593.
During the Qing period, gilt-metal mounts and feet were sometimes added to treasured vessels of
earlier date, such as the Yuan circular basin decorated with scrolling lotus, in the collection of the
Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris, illustrated in Cloisonné: Chinese Enamels from the Yuan, Ming, and
Qing Dynasties, New York, 2011, p. 228, pl. 10.

清康熙/雍正 掐絲琺瑯開光五獅戲綉球紋花口面盆

(interior)

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