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拍品專文
These apparently unique dishes are enameled with the iconic views of Whampoa and Canton so familiar from China Trade oil paintings. Apart from the well-known "hong bowls", only a handful of porcelains depict Canton or other favored China Trade painting subjects. An armorial dinner service made for a Dutch VOC director about 1760 shows a view of Boca Tigris, Neptune riding on waves in the foreground with the coat-of-arms beside him (see Hervouët & Bruneau, op cit, p 21). A massive punchbowl in the collection of the Bostonian Society and inscribed ...TO DWIGHT BOYDEN--TREMONT HOUSE BOSTON 1832 is decorated inside with a very painterly view of the Canton waterfront (Mudge, ibid, p 224) and the remarkable, massive punchbowl at the Metropolitan Museum, New York inscribed Presented ...to the City of New York July the 4th 1812 shows a similarly painterly view of New York harbor.
Someone with imagination clearly commissioned these dishes, presumably a very small set, as no other pieces with this decoration have turned up on the market or in published collections. The view of Canton seems to have been inspired by paintings of about 1830, judging by the somewhat limited details provided, while the enameller seems to have copied an earlier view of Whampoa. Both punchbowls cited above show, as Homer Eaton Keyes put it, "the evidence of many stirring encounters with a silver ladle." (ibid, p 119). These dishes seem instead to have been kept safe, as treasured show pieces.
Someone with imagination clearly commissioned these dishes, presumably a very small set, as no other pieces with this decoration have turned up on the market or in published collections. The view of Canton seems to have been inspired by paintings of about 1830, judging by the somewhat limited details provided, while the enameller seems to have copied an earlier view of Whampoa. Both punchbowls cited above show, as Homer Eaton Keyes put it, "the evidence of many stirring encounters with a silver ladle." (ibid, p 119). These dishes seem instead to have been kept safe, as treasured show pieces.