A RARE UNDERGLAZE-BLUE-DECORATED PEACH-FORM WATER DROPPER

Details

A RARE UNDERGLAZE-BLUE-DECORATED PEACH-FORM WATER DROPPER
choson period (15th century)

Of perfectly proportioned peach form balanced on a raised ring foot enclosing the recessed base and moulded with a curved, tubular spout, painted in carefully delineated strokes of pale and darker strokes of underglaze-blue turned brown in the firing with four branches of bamboo, below and to the right and above the spout, also decorated with an evenly applied white glaze with some vertical craquelure above the foot and with a high lustre, foot unglazed, recessed base glazed white--3 1/8in. (8.2cm.) high, 3 5/8in. (9.3cm.) diameter

Lot Essay

A peach-form water-dropper of similar date, decorated in underglaze blue with pine and plum, is illustrated in Byung-chang Rhee, Masterpieces of Korean Art--Yi Ceramics (Tokyo: privately published, 1978) no. 49 and Choi Sunu, National Museum of Korea, Seoul, The World's Great Collections, Oriental Ceramics, vol. 2 (Tokyo, New York and San Francisco: Kodansha International, Ltd., 1982), pl. 98. See also no. 300 in the same publication for a discussion of a porcelain dish of the same period decorated with a grape design in underglaze-blue. Rhee suggests that the blackness of the cobalt was an intentional attempt to achieve an ink-link quality in the decoration rather than a result of impurities in the cobalt. A Korean official document dated 1481 states that artists from the Academy of Painting frequently painted decoration on porcelain made for the royal house. The painterly quality of the decoration of both the dish and the present water-dropper is a reflection of this.