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Lot Essay
As the English East India companies began to trade in the Far East English hounds became an important commodity for them too. In 1614 Captain Saris wrote recommending a "...fine greyhound..." as tribute for the Daimyo of Hirado and the same year the Governor of Surat requested from the East India Company "...looking glasses, figures of beasts or birds made of glass, mastiffs, greyhounds, spaniels and little dogs..." (See W. Heinemann, Dogs of China and Japan in Nature and Art, London 1921). Giuseppe Castiglione, Jesuit painter at the Beijing court, portrayed English hounds with white underbellies in Chinese landscape in a 1765 series of gouaches (now in the National Palace Museum, Taipei).
The Chinese had their own tradition of domesticated dogs, and also of ceramic animal sculpture. Models of dogs wearing tasselled or bell-hung collars appear in Han and Tang dynasty tomb pottery, along with their more famous horse and camel cousins. Small Chinese porcelain models of hounds made for export survive in some numbers, in blanc-de-chine porcelain from the 17th century, listed as "toys" on the Dutch East India Company bills of lading, and in iron-red decorated Jingdezhen ware from the 18th century. The monumental size of the present hound, however, was no doubt difficult to achieve as well as vastly expensive, and was certainly attempted only on special order. Fewer than half a dozen of comparable importance are recorded. One is in the collection of Mrs. Lammot du Pont Copeland and a promised gift to the Peabody Museum of Salem, illustrated and discussed by William R. Sargent, The Copeland Collection, p. 139; a pair in a private Italian collection is illustrated by M. Beurdeley and G. Raindre, Qing Porcelain, no. 290; and two pairs were sold respectively at Sotheby's London, 10 June 1997, lot 242 and Christie's New York, 21 January 1999, lot 156.
The Chinese had their own tradition of domesticated dogs, and also of ceramic animal sculpture. Models of dogs wearing tasselled or bell-hung collars appear in Han and Tang dynasty tomb pottery, along with their more famous horse and camel cousins. Small Chinese porcelain models of hounds made for export survive in some numbers, in blanc-de-chine porcelain from the 17th century, listed as "toys" on the Dutch East India Company bills of lading, and in iron-red decorated Jingdezhen ware from the 18th century. The monumental size of the present hound, however, was no doubt difficult to achieve as well as vastly expensive, and was certainly attempted only on special order. Fewer than half a dozen of comparable importance are recorded. One is in the collection of Mrs. Lammot du Pont Copeland and a promised gift to the Peabody Museum of Salem, illustrated and discussed by William R. Sargent, The Copeland Collection, p. 139; a pair in a private Italian collection is illustrated by M. Beurdeley and G. Raindre, Qing Porcelain, no. 290; and two pairs were sold respectively at Sotheby's London, 10 June 1997, lot 242 and Christie's New York, 21 January 1999, lot 156.