An Unusual Inscribed Brown-Glazed Jar

TANG DYNASTY, 8TH-9TH CENTURY

細節

An Unusual Inscribed Brown-Glazed Jar
Tang dynasty, 8th-9th century
Of ovoid form with a pair of double-strap loop handles flanking the shallow waisted neck and everted rim, covered inside and out with an olive-brown glaze carved on one side with an eight-character inscription, Shen Zhongjian tai zheng ri pei hao ri, and ending in an irregular line above a flared foot with beveled edge and flat base
7 3/8in. (18.7cm.) high, box
Falk Collection no. 15.

來源

Mathias Komor, New York, March 1949.

拍品專文

The inscription may be translated: 'Shen Zhongjian donated this on the Taizheng day, an auspicious day.' Taizheng is another name for Taibai, the planet Venus, a star whose presence was regarded as auspicious and a harbinger of prosperity and peace.

Jars dating from the Tang dynasty (618-907) with characters incised through the glaze to reveal the body beneath are unusual, and most published pieces are from later periods, usually dating from the Jin or Tangut Xixia dynasties (11th-13th centuries). Compare, for example, a Jin black-glazed stoneware bottle with a calligraphic inscription illustrated in Mayuyama: Seventy Years, vol. I, Tokyo, 1976, p. 201, no. 603; a bottle illustrated in The Charles B. Hoyt Collection in the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, vol. II, Boston, 1972, pl. 106; and a meiping illustrated in the Kaikodo Journal, Spring 1998, pp. 202-3, 280.