18TH CENTURY

This beautiful pair of jardinières is exquisitely painted with overglaze enamels in the famille verte palette. It is extremely rare to see vessels of this form decorated with such high quality painting. Indeed, the painting is among the finest to be found on famille verte porcelains, and is on a par with that seen on the so-called 'birthday' plates, believed to have been made for the 60th birthday of the Kangxi Emperor in AD 1713. It is probably no coincidence that the decorative scenes on the jardinières also provide close links with the 'birthday' plates. The scene of ducks on one of the vessels is particularly close to that on one of the 'birthday' plates in the Percival David Foundation illustrated by R. Scott, Imperial Taste - Chinese Ceramics from the Percival David Foundation, San Francisco, 1989, p. 79, no. 48. All aspects of the painting on the David Foundation plate and the jardinière are similar. The ripples on the water are created using fine black highlights under pale green enamel. The lotus leaves are painted with mottled brown, ragged, edges and the top of the reeds are rendered with tiny dots of dark brown enamel. Even more significant is the fact that the ducks are painted in exactly the same positions relative to each other, using the same painting style and the same colors. There are some areas of the ducks painted in 'boneless' style - without outlines - and this is also seen on the small birds that perch on the reeds on both the jardinière and the 'birthday' plate. A similar 'birthday' plate in the collection of the Musée Guimet is illustrated in Oriental Ceramics, The World's Great Collections, vol. 7 Tokyo, 1981, no. 35.

Another 'birthday' plate design is close to that on the second jardinière. This design shows geese on a riverbank with grasses and trees bearing russet autumn leaves. One of these 'birthday' plates is in the Palmer collection, while another with similar scene, although with the birds arranged in mirror-image, was exhibited in Hong Kong, In Pursuit of Antiquities - Thirty-fifth Anniversary Exhibition of the Min Chiu Society, Urban Council, Hong Kong, 1995, p. 182, no. 134. In this case, too, not only the decorative scheme, but also the techniques and quality of the enamel painting is extremely similar between the 'birthday' plates and the jardinière.

While examples with such fine painting are very rare, jardinières decorated in famille verte enamels appear to have been popular in the Kangxi reign, and low scrolled feet similar to those on the current vessels can be seen on a rectangular planter in the Shanghai Museum. See Kangxi Porcelain Wares from the Shanghai Museum Collection, op. cit., p. 209, no. 136. The Shanghai planter also shares with the pair of jardinières the characteristic bluish-tinged glaze. The current vessels are relatively shallow suggesting that they were either intended as bulb bowls or as trays to hold precious pencai - miniature trees or landscapes.