NORTHERN SONG DYNASTY, 10TH–11TH CENTURY

The elegant yuhuchunping form, possibly used as a decanter of wine, was eminently suitable to grace the tables of the refined Song elite. When William Watson illustrated a similar vase in Tang and Liao Ceramics, London, 1984, pl. 63, he noted that this form is “...one of the purest expressions of the feeling for delicately curving, unarticulated profiles which grew through the Five Dynasties period into the Northern Song.” This similar vase, from the Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Eugene Bernat, was previously illustrated in The Ceramic Art of China, London, 1971 no. 57, pl. 40.

See, also, other similar vases, one from the Charles B. Hoyt Collection in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, illustrated in the Memorial Exhibition Catalogue, 1952, pl. 88, no. 349; one in the Hakone Art Museum, Japan, illustrated in Mayuyama, Seventy Years, 1976, vol. 1, no. 637; one in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, illustrated by S. Valenstein in The Herzman Collection of Chinese Ceramics, New York, 1992, no. 25 and one in Born of Earth and Fire, Chinese Ceramics from the Scheinman Collection, 1992, no. 57.