An Unusual Unglazed Porcelain Funerary Urn and Cover

SOUTHERN SONG DYNASTY, 12TH CENTURY

Details

An Unusual Unglazed Porcelain Funerary Urn and Cover
Southern Song dynasty, 12th century
Of Jingdezhen porcelain type, the shoulder applied with the animals of the Four Quarters, the tortoise with a snake coiled around its body, the Green Dragon, the Scarlet Bird and the White Tiger, all resting on a pinched 'ropetwist' border above a wide band of carved fishnet design on the body, the stepped conical cover with wide everted rim and bud finial, the interior of the neck and the cover with a white-toned glaze
9in. (22.9cm.) high.
Falk Collection no. 73.

Provenance

Mathias Komor, New York, September 1947.

Lot Essay

The treatment of the animals on this urn is particularly charming and seems to have been a feature of certain unglazed funerary wares made at Jingdezhen in the Southern Song period. Similarly modeled animals of the Four Quarters appear on the shoulders of a funerary urn in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, see Oriental Ceramics, The World's Great Collections, vol. 10, Tokyo, 1982, no. 89. Such animals also appear on the shoulders of a very elaborate urn, now in the Jingdezhen Ceramics Museum, see Zhongguo Wenwu Jinghua Daquan - Taoci juan, Taipei, 1993, no. 383, which was excavated in 1964 from a tomb in Jingdezhen dated to AD 1173. Like the Falk urn, these two urns are also unglazed.

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