THE PROPERTY OF AN AMERICAN COLLECTOR
A RARE EARLY MING BLUE AND WHITE DISH

Details
A RARE EARLY MING BLUE AND WHITE DISH
YONGLE PERIOD (1403-1424)

Painted in soft tones of deep cobalt blue punctuated by characteristic 'heaping and piling' with a slender interlacing vine bearing a central blossom and three subsidiary blossoms and buds including peony, camellia and mallow surrounded by their respective leaves, below a continuous band of composite floral scroll to the cavetto and a band of foliate vines encircling the rim, the exterior with a further frieze of eleven composite flowerheads, the base unglazed
16 1/8 in. (41 cm.) diam.

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Carrie Li
Carrie Li

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Lot Essay

It is extremely rare to find a Yongle dish with a rounded rim decorated with a continuous vine around the rim rather than cresting waves and very few examples have been published. A dish of the same size and pattern in the Ardebil Shrine Collection inscribed in Farsi with the Shah Abbas' mark is illustrated by T. Misugi, Chinese Porcelain Collections in the Near East, Vol. 3, The Ardebil Shrine Collection, Hong Kong, 1981, p. 121, no. A.37 alongside a dish of the same pattern with the more conventional cresting wave border, ibid., p. 120, no. A 36.

Three similar dishes of the same pattern with a vine border around the everted rim have been sold at auction; the first was sold at Sotheby's London, 16 November 1971, lot 89; the second at Christie's London, 5 June 1995, lot 119; and the third at Sotheby's New York, 6 December 1989, lot 160.

For further examples of dishes with the same pattern but with a cresting wave border compare a dish excavated at Dongmentou, Zhushan, in 1994, and exhibited at the Chang Foundation, Taipei, Imperial Hongwu and Yongle Porcelain Excavated at Jingdezhen, 1996, Catalogue no. 44. Other similar examples include one in the National Palace Museum, Taipei, published in the Illustrated Catalogue of Ming Dynasty Porcelain, 1977, pl. 37; one exhibited at the Hong Kong Museum of Art, Ming and Ch'ing Porcelain from the Collection of the T. Y. Chao Family Foundation, 1978, and illustrated in the Catalogue, no. 5; one illustrated by J. Ayers, The Baur Collection, Geneva, 1969, vol. II, no. A140; and another included in the Philadelphia Museum of Art Exhibition of Chinese Blue and White, 1994, illustrated in the Catalogue, no. 38.

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