A RARE AND SMALL CLAIR-DE-LUNE DISH, YONGZHENG MARK AND PERIOD

Sotheby’s Hong Kong, 17th November 1975, lot 130 (one of a pair).

Eskenazi Ltd., London, 1975.

Marchant, London.

Christie's New York, 14th September 2017, lot 743.

來源

香港蘇富比1975年11月17日，編號130（一對之一）

埃斯卡納齊，倫敦，1975年

Marchant，倫敦

紐約佳士得2017年9月14日，編號743

Exuding understated elegance characteristic of the Yongzheng period, the present dish is covered in a luminous clair-de-lune glaze inspired by the celebrated Ru wares of the Song dynasty. This high-fired glaze, with a cobalt content of about 1%, was first produced by the imperial kilns in Jingdezhen during the Kangxi Emperor’s reign. Known in the West by the nineteenth-century French connoisseurs’ term clair-de-lune (‘moon light’), and in China as tianlan (‘sky blue’), it was one of the most successful monochrome glazes created in Jingdezhen during the Kangxi reign and reserved exclusively for imperial porcelains, remaining popular throughout the Qing dynasty.

A pair of closely related dishes from the Zhuyuetang Collection was included in the exhibition A Millennium of Monochromes from the Great Tang to the High Qing. The Baur and Zhuyuetang Collections, Baur Foundation, Geneva, 2018, cat. no. 88; a dish in the Nanjing Museum is published in The Official Kiln Porcelain of the Chinese Qing Dynasty, Shanghai, 2003, p. 208; and another pair from the Sir Percival David Collection and now in the British Museum, London, is included in Illustrated Catalogue of Ming and Qing Monochrome Wares in the Percival David Foundation of Chinese Art, London, 1989, no. B560-1. A Yongzheng mark and period dish of slightly larger size, but with rounded sides, was sold twice in these rooms, 10th-11th October 1962, lot 122, and again, 12th September 2018, lot 128, from the collection of Aron and Elizabeth Landauer.