QIANLONG

Details

A Rare Ming-Style Blue and White Moon Flask
Qianlong
Each side well painted in the Ming style with simulated 'heaped and piled' effect with a scaly, five-clawed dragon shown full-face as it leaps around a flaming pearl amidst clouds and flames above a band of froth-capped waves at the base, the cylindrical neck flanked by a pair of molded dragon-scroll handles detailed in white on a blue wash ground and decorated on each side with a bat surrounded by vapor spandrels between a band of upright leaf tips and a band of waves below the lipped rim
15¾in. (40cm.) high, cloth box

Provenance

Sotheby's, London, 13 June 1989, lot 263.

Lot Essay

No other dragon flask of this pattern appears to have been published.

An unmarked flask of the same form and with the same dragon handles, but decorated with a meandering floral pattern, is illustrated by U. Weisner, Chinesisches Porzellan: Die Ohlmer'sche Sammlung im Roemer-Museum, Hildesheim, 1981, p. 111, no. 54. Another example of a flask of the same form and with the same dragon handles, but decorated with a floral pattern and bearing a Qianlong mark, is illustrated in The Tsui Museum of Art, Hong Kong, 1991, no. 97.

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