A FINELY PAINTED FAMILLE VERTE ROULEAU VASE

細節
A FINELY PAINTED FAMILLE VERTE ROULEAU VASE
KANGXI

Decorated in vivid enamels and gilding with a continuous, dense scene of a battle, probably a scene from the The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, depicting a general looking down on a group of soldiers on horseback as they corner a dark-faced warrior on a black horse, all within a mountainous landscape, the shoulder painted with panels of various Buddhist emblems reserved on a floral and green scroll ground below the neck decorated with a scene of a fisherman in a mountain river landscape and the mouth rim encircled by key pattern
16 7/8in. (42.9cm.) high
來源
Edward Chow Collection

拍品專文

Two comparable vases with battle scenes on the main register and landscape around the neck are illustrated by Mino and Robinson in Beauty and Tranquility: The Eli Lilly Collection of Chinese Art, Indianapolis Museum of Art, 1983, p. 338, fig. 14. The present vase, however, is remarkable for its quality of painting

The scene illustrated on this vase is most probably Sanguozhi Yanyi (The Romance of the Three Kingdoms). The novel is set during the collapse of the Eastern Han dynasty when China splintered into Three Kingdoms. It recounts the efforts of Liu Bei, a member of the Han imperial house to reunite the country. Liu Bei formed an alliance with Guan Yu (later deified as Guandi, the Daoist god of war) and Zhang Fei, a commoner who had earned his living as a butcher and is often depicted with a black face, and together they fought against Cao Cao, the dictator of Wei who seized control of north China

For further reading on the subject, refer to the article by David T. Johnson, "Narrative Themes on Kangxi Porcelains in the Taft Museum", Orientations, August, 1993, pp. 31-36