A RARE AND FINELY PAINTED EARLY MING BLUE AND WHITE PEAR-SHAPED VASE, YUHUCHUNPING

細節
A RARE AND FINELY PAINTED EARLY MING BLUE AND WHITE PEAR-SHAPED VASE, YUHUCHUNPING
HONGWU

The well-potted body decorated in a painterly style with the 'Three Friends', prunus, bamboo and pine, shown in a landscape with fantastic rocks and plantain, set between a band of petal lappets below and a lambrequin border above, the neck decorated with foliate scroll and key-fret borders below a wide band of upright leaves rising to the everted rim painted on top with a band of classic scroll, with a further band of key-fret encircling the ring foot, all in soft tones of grayish underglaze blue enhanced by 'heaping and piling' of iron tone 12 7/8in. (32.7cm.) high, box

拍品專文

Of the few yuhuchunping of this period painted with this decoration, no other example executed in underglaze blue, rather than copper-red, appears to have been published

See the vase in the collection of the Palace Museum, Beijing, included in the exhibition, Peking Kokyu Hakubutsuin Ten (Treasures from the Palace Museum), Tokyo, 1982, Catalogue, p. 77, no. 46; one illustrated in Zhongguo Meishu Quanji, Gongyi Meishu (The Great Treasury of Chinese Fine Arts, Arts and Crafts), vol. 3, Beijing, 1988, pl. 38; and the vase from the Addis Collection included in the exhibition, Chinese Art under the Mongols: The Yuan Dynasty (1279-1368), The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1968, Catalogue, no. 171. The decoration on this latter vase, the closest to the present vase, is also illustrated by Jessica Rawson in a panoramic view in Chinese Ornament, The Lotus and the Dragon, British Museum, 1984, p. 119, fig. 104, where the author discusses the decoration as "typical of a new formula in which the prunus was associated with other garden plants, in particular the pine and bamboo, to make a trio later known as the Three Friends of Winter". She further notes that "the plants have been added one after another, until a planted garden is suggested, but we are not truly led to believe that we are looking at a real garden"