A RARE "GARDEN OF EDEN" BOWL

QIANLONG PERIOD

Details

A RARE "GARDEN OF EDEN" BOWL
QIANLONG PERIOD
Finely painted around the exterior in a delicate famille rose palette with a lively array of paired animals, including elephants, deer, cows, sheep, and horses, grazing in landscape beside a lake, nearby three single mythical Chinese beasts, a large Buddhist lion, a blue qilin, and a yellow phoenix-goat, prance before a winged hirsute man who emerges from a rocky outcropping, four monkeys in an overhanging tree reach for clusters of berries, the interior with a spearhead border above central pink rose spray
10 3/8 in. (26.5 cm.) diameter

Lot Essay

A slightly larger bowl with this somewhat mysterious subject was sold Christie's London, 28 April 1999, lot 160. By the late Middle Ages in Europe the Garden of Eden was thought of as a sort of paradise, often populated with African and Asian animals, as so famously portrayed by Hieronymous Bosch (1450?-1516) in The Garden of Earthly Delights (now in the Prado, Madrid) where, in the left panel, we see the Garden with elephants and giraffes and exotic birds. The bowl's version may have been based on a European engraving that included the Archangel Gabriel, guardian of Paradise. Perhaps the Chinese painter then added those auspicious beasts more familiar to him.

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