The cluttered spacing of formal foliate scrolls on this class of 'domestic cobalt' dish is evidence that the 'ceramic canvas' is still a cause of concern, as much as a challenge, to domestic porcelain painters. Access only to local cobalt, for a period under the Hongwu Emperor, also diminished the painter's ability to take full advantage of the lush violet-blue tones which had often been successfully obtained on vessels thirty years earlier, and which would again be possible as the Yongle Emperor established a more effective political control facilitating a major revival of the overland trade with foreign cobalt-producing countries.

Cf. an example in the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities, illustrated in Oriental Ceramics, vol.8, col.pl.III which has a lotus scroll in the well and chrysanthemum around the rim; a more densely decorated example in underglaze-red with six peonies arranged in a 'pyramid' formation at the centre, formerly in the C. T. Loo Collection, is illustrated in Ming Blue and White, Philadelphia 1949 Exhibition, Catalogue, no.19; two examples with flowers of the four seasons, one with sprays in the medallion enclosing a single lotus spray in the National Palace Museum, Taipei, are illustrated in Blue and White Ware of the Ming Dynasty, Book I, pls. 3 - 3b, where the flowers are repeated on the exterior; the other, also in the National Palace Museum, ibid., col. pls. 2 - 2b, is painted with single sprays of the flowers of the four seasons each enclosed in a ruyi-head all making up a quatrefoil. In the Hongwu period, due to the port closures enforced by the Emperor, copper-red was more widely used in preference over the manganese-rich Chinese cobalt which produced greyish-blue tones as exemplified by the present lot

A closely similar dish is in the Swedish Royal Collections of the late H.M. King Gustav VI Adolf, formerly in Japan, illustrated in Mayuyama Seventy Years, vol.I, no.711