QIANLONG SEAL MARK IN UNDERGLAZE BLUE AND OF THE PERIOD (1736-1795)

Notable for its elegant silhouette and subtly bluish glaze, suffused with a fine network of crackles, the present vase exhibits the Qianlong Emperor’s well-known fascination with Southern Song Guan wares and his broader antiquarian pursuit that shaped the court taste in the eighteenth century. It also represents a technical refinement of the Jingdezhen imperial kilns. The potters have captured the prototype’s characteristically dense, unctuous and jade-like glazed surface while also reproducing the deliberate contrast of the dark, unglazed foot, stained after firing to evoke the “iron foot” of Song-dynasty originals.

A nearly identical Qianlong Guan-type vase, formerly in the J. M. Hu Zande Lou Collection, is illustrated by H. D. Ling and E. T. Chow in Collection of Chinese Ceramics from the Pavilion of Ephemeral Attainment, vol. IV, Hong Kong, 1950, pl. 172, and was later sold at Imperial Qing Monochromes from the J. M. Hu Collection; Christie’s Hong Kong, 29 November 2017, lot 2855. The form may also be compared with a closely related Qianlong vase of the same profile but covered in a Ge-type glaze, sold at Sotheby’s Hong Kong, 20 May 1986, lot 83.