18TH 19TH CENTURY

This handsome vase has a particularly fine copper red glaze in the style of the so-called Langyao porcelains of the Kangxi reign. The colour has the brilliance associated with these latter wares, which was partly the result of using a smaller amount of copper oxide in the glaze. This was one of the features of copper red glazes when they were 're-invented' in the early Qing period. The glaze also has the lively bubble structure and attractive streaked effect that is characteristic of Langyao red wares. The later potters have also succeeded in giving the vessel the delicate, extended, grading from white to red at the rim. Studies have shown that the red colour is only found in the middle part of the glaze, being inhibited by proximity to both the porcelain body and to the air. The use of a glaze that ran thin at the rim, to the point at which it no longer supported the red layer, and gradually thickened towards the lower part of the neck ensured this shaded effect.

The elegant form of this vase relates to the Kangxi zhi vessel with Langyao copper red glaze in the National Palace Museum (illustrated in Qing danse youci tezhan, National Palace Museum, Taipei, 1981, p. 41, no. 4), and to another Kangxi copper red vessel described as a pipa zun by Geng baochang in Ming Qing ciqi Jianding, Forbidden City Publishing House Woods Publishing, Hong Kong, 1993, p. 508, pl. 97. The current vessel has a somewhat wider, shorter, neck and more generous body than either the Taipei or Beijing examples, and in fact relates more closely in profile to the early bronze vessels that inspired this porcelain form (see W. Perceval Yetts, The Cull Bronzes, Courtauld Institute of Art, London University, 1939, plate X, no. 7).