INCISED JOHANNEUM MARK N=176, YONGZHENG (1723-35)

See W. B. Honey, European Ceramic Art, pp.337 and 338, where the author explains that the Johanneum was "the building at Dresden, now a museum, containing the former Royal Saxon Porcelain Collection started and largely formed in the so-called Japanese Palace by Augustus the Strong, Elector of Saxony (b.1670, d.1733). The specimens belonging to the old Collection bear marks referring to an inventory begun in 1721; these were engraved on the wheel and coloured black.....with numbers and letters corresponding to the class of porcelain: ......an 'H' written sideways [as in the present dishes] for 'green Chinese'."

Compare the smaller dish in the Dresden Porcelain Collection, with the same inventory number, exhibited La maladie de porcelaine....... East Asian Porcelain from the Collection of Augustus the Strong, Dresden, 2001, no.31, p.76. Compare also the considerably smaller dish from the Mottahedeh Collection with the same Johanneum mark, illustrated by Howard and Ayers, China for the West, London and New York, 1978, p.148, no. 128, where the authors also comment that the presence of a Johanneum mark "almost certainly indicates that the piece entered the collection before the death of King Augustus in 1733. An identical dish [to the Mottahedeh example] is in the Victoria and Albert Museum, the gift of Queen Victoria in 1860".