YUAN DYNASTY (1279-1368)

The bracket-lobed shape of this dish appears in a number of media during the Yuan period, most notably in metal, porcelain and lacquer, and was adopted for a variety of vessels in both the Song and Yuan dynasties, such as the seven-lobed lacquer box excavated from the Southern Song tomb at Wujin, Jiangsu province in 1977-78, illustrated by Chen Jing, "Important newly excavated Southern Song lacquers from Wujin, Jiangsu," Wenwu, 1979:3, pp. 47-48, pl. 2, figs. 4 and 6. Another bracket-lobed box, with six lobes, was excavated from a Southern Song tomb in Fuzhou city in 1975 and illustrated in an article by the Fujian Provincial Museum, "Brief, orderly, report of the excavation of a Southern Song tomb in the northern suburbs of Fuzhou city", Wenwu, 1977:7, p. 11, pl. 3. no. 2.
The present dish is of exceptionally beautiful form, with crisp molding. Compare the bracket-lobed lacquer dish dated to the Yuan dynasty of the same size and shape as the present dish, which was sold at Christie's Hong Kong, 30 April 2001, lot 627; a slightly larger (21.5 cm. diam.) black lacquer example of the same shape in the Tokyo National Museum illustrated in Hai-wai Yi-Chen, Chinese Art in Overseas Collections: Lacquerware, 1987, no. 42; and another of slightly smaller size (20 cm. diam.) in the collection of the Freer Gallery, Washington, D.C., illustrated in The Freer Gallery of Art - I, China, 1972, no. 114.