AN EARLY MING BLUE AND WHITE DISH

YONGLE

Details

AN EARLY MING BLUE AND WHITE DISH
Yongle
The interior painted in deep cobalt tones of underglaze blue enhanced by areas of "heaping and piling" with a finely drawn meandering vine bearing a central blossom and three subsidiary blossoms and buds, including peony, camelia and mallow, each surrounded by its individualized leaves, below a continuous band of composite floral scroll in the deep, rounded walls of the well and a band of cresting waves on the canted rim, the exterior encircled by a further frieze of composite foliate scroll, all within double line borders, the base unglazed
16in. (40.5cm.) diam., box

Lot Essay

Dishes of this pattern seem to have been popular in the Near East. One in the Art Institute of Chicago was included in the University of Chicago exhibition, Blue and White, 1985, Catalogue, no. 22, where it is noted that dishes of this type were widely exported to the Near East and that their influence can be seen in Persia, Syria and Egypt. Another of these well-traveled dishes is illustrated by John Alexander Pope, Chinese Porcelain in the Ardebil Shrine, Washington, D.C., 1956, pl. 34, fig. 29.88 and one inscribed in Farsi around the foot rim with the name of the Emperor Shah Jehan and the date corresponding to 1632 is illustrated by Peter Hardie, "China's Ceramic Trade with India", T.O.C.S., 1983-84, vol. 48, p. 19, pl. 3

Other dishes of this pattern and shape are in public and private collections, and a dish excavated in 1994 at Dongmentou, Zhushan, was included in the exhibition, Imperial Hongwu and Yongle Porcelain excavated at Jingdezhen, Chang Foundation, Taipei, 1996, pp. 152-153, no. 44

Previously sold in our Hong Kong rooms, October 31, 1994, lot 54