XUANDE SIX-CHARACTER MARK IN A LINE IN UNDERGLAZE BLUE AND OF THE PERIOD (1426-1435)

Known as “fruit bowls” at the Qing court, this type of blue and white bowls from the Yongle and Xuande periods are potted with thick rounded walls and range between 27 cm. and 31 cm. in diameter.

Other bowls of the design are in museums and private collections worldwide, including one in the National Palace Museum, Taiwan, included in Catalogue of the Special Exhibition of Selected Hsüan-te Imperial Porcelains of the Ming Dynasty , Taipei, 1998, no. 47; one in the Percival David Foundation, London, illustrated in Oriental Ceramics. The World's Great Collections , Tokyo, New York, San Francisco, 1980-82, vol. 6, no. 98; one in the Freer Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C, included in the exhibition catalogue Ming Porcelains in the Freer Gallery of Art , Washington, D.C, 1953, no. 10; one from the collection of Stephen Junkunc III, exhibited at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1949, sold at Sotheby’s New York, 22 March 1995, lot 234; one from the F. Gordon Morrill Collection, sold at Doyle New York,16 September 2003, lot 91; one from the Toguri collection, sold at Sotheby’s London, 9 June 2004, lot 16; one formerly in the collections of Wu Lai Hsi, Eskenazi, and Meiyintang, sold at Poly Beijing, 5 June 2014, lot 8007; and one from the Tianminlou Collection, sold at Sotheby’s Hong Kong, 3 April 2019, lot 5.