JIAJING SIX-CHARACTER MARK IN UNDERGLAZE BLUE WITHIN A DOUBLE CIRCLE AND OF THE PERIOD (1522-1566)

This brush washer belongs to an extremely rare group of Jiajing doucai-decorated vessels closely following Chenghua prototypes. A closely related washer of similar size (15.8 cm. diam.) in the Shanghai Museum is illustrated by Lu Minghua, Mingdai guanyao ciqi, Shanghai, 2007, p. 211, pl. 4-10. The Shanghai example is dated to the Jiajing period, although the base is unglazed. It is possible that the original reign mark may have been removed. A related small cup decorated with flower sprays, bearing a Jiajing reign mark, also from the J.M. Hu Collection, was sold at Christie's New York, 15 September 2009, lot 353. The latter is very closely based on earlier Ming prototypes from the Chenghua stratum at Jingdezhen.
No directly comparable prototypes for the present washer appear to be found among extant Chenghua examples, but the form relates closely to several washers of approximately the same size in the National Palace Museum, Taiwan, included in the Special Exhibition of Ch'eng-Hua Porcelain Ware, 1465-1487, Taipei, 2003, nos. 189-91. It is interesting to note that the rims of these examples all appear to be unglazed, and in two cases bound in metal. The fruiting branches on the current washer relate closely to the decoration found on a number of pieces from the Chenghua stratum at Zhushan, Jingdezhen, included in the Tsui Museum of Art exhibition A Legacy of Chenghua, Hong Kong, 1993, illustrated in the catalogue, nos. C115, C117 and C122.