A rare enamelled and blue and white 'fish' jar, guan. Jiajing six-character mark and of the period

A splendid Ming dynasty jar, a rare survivor from a vanished era of Imperial Chinese prestige, will be offered at Bonhams New Bond Street on 14 May. Created in the reign of the Emperor Jiajing (AD1522-66), and estimated at up to £250,000, it comes from the collection of the Palmer family, of Huntley and Palmer fame, and will be a highlight of London’s Summer Asia Week Chinese art auction sales.

A Bonhams spokesman said: “Items like this with impeccable provenance, great rarity and the highest quality always seem to retain their value and in fact grow it over the years. There is only a very limited number of objects of this rarity and beauty available.”

Golden carp fish were highly prized by Chinese connoisseurs during the Ming Dynasty, both for their rarity, and for their association with the images of great wealth and success. One 16th Century Ming Emperor of China appreciated this subtle blending of imagery so much that he commissioned porcelain to be decorated at the Imperial kilns with this rare design, which he then ordered to be displayed in the palaces at his capital, Beijing.

Painted in vibrant blue and gold, the jar will appeal to any of the worlds great collectors of Chinese porcelain, mostly based in Chinese-speaking Asia. Many of them know that designs on Imperial Chinese porcelain often carry subtle allusions, and represent literary messages to be understood by the cognoscenti. Here the association is explicit: expensive porcelain, potted and painted to the exacting standards of an Emperor, carries unambiguous images of wealth and prestige. Even today, golden carp are carefully bred to maximise the distinctive markings beloved of Chinese collectors. The colour gold reverberates down the centuries, as an unmistakable statement that the Ming owner of this jar was a man of the greatest financial substance.

Nothing is known of the early travels of this golden carp jar, until it came to auction in England about four hundred years later. It was always too expensive, too Imperial to be exported as part of the English East India Companys annual shipments of Chinese goods, which enriched British interiors over two centuries: Chinese export furniture, lacquer, fans, wallpaper, and of course porcelain dinner and tea services, flower pots, sets of mantelpiece vases. This jar was far grander in conception and execution than any Chinese Export service painted with a Western familys coat-of-arms.

Its recorded history in Europe begins in 1935, when it appeared at a London auction from the famous collection of Charles Russell. Sold to the best-known London dealer in Chinese art, Bluett and Sons, it entered an equally famous English private collection in The same year for the princely sum of UKP55. This collection of Chinese porcelain and other art was being formed by a leading British businessman, Reginald Palmer, chairman of the internationally successful biscuits and cakes company Huntley and Palmer. The factory was based at Newbury, Berkshire; and his large country house, nearby, came to be liberally furnished with top-quality Chinese art, especially porcelain and jade. This was increasingly available to buy from London dealers, because the breakdown of Chinese Imperial authority and the abolition of dynastic government in 1911 had led to large quantities of Imperial Palace art being sold to the art dealers of Beijing and Shanghai, and subsequently shipped to London.

The Palmer golden carp jar has remained with the family ever since its first (and last) appearance at a London auction in 1935. One of only very few remaining in public and private collections, this auspicious jar will surely generate great interest because of its lustre of Imperial Chinese ownership, outstanding potting craftsmanship, freshness to the auction arena, and provenance from an historically significant English collection.

The robust stout body with gently rounded shoulders rising to a short straight neck, decorated around the exterior in bold tones of cobalt blue with a border of stylised lotus panels around the foot and a band of plantain leaves beneath a classic scroll at the neck, the central register with eight fish in yellow enamel with details picked out in iron-red amidst clusters of various aquatic weeds and lotus sprays.  30.2cm (11¾in) high - Estimate: £180,000 - 250,000

Provenance: Charles Russell, sold at Sotheby's London, 6 June 1935, lot 96.
Bluett and Sons
R.H.R Palmer, R.H.R.P. collection label no.356.
Palmer Inventory no.356, where it is stated that the jar was purchased in June 1935 for £55. However, this was the price paid at auction above and R.H.R.Palmer paid to Bluett and Sons £70.
By descent to the present owner

Note: Jiajing 'fish' jars are among the most ambitious and remarkable porcelain wares of the later Ming Dynasty with their popularity and prominence deeply rooted within Chinese iconography and philosophical and aesthetic history.

From as early as the Neolithic Period, fish have been a standard and repeated motif in the canon of Chinese art and design. They first appeared on earthenware vessels produced by the Yangshao culture at Banpo, Shanxi Province, which was heavily reliant on freshwater fish as part of their diet, and made prominent reappearances through the Song, Yuan and early Ming Dynasties and later, particularly, during the reign of the Jiajing Emperor.

Fish have always held an important role in Daoist imagery, where they are emblematic of the free-thinking spirit of the philosophy, as described in the Zhuanzhi by Zhang Zhou (circa 370-300BC). The Jiajing Emperor was a devout and fervent Daoist and during his reign Daoism became the key form of ritual activity at court. Furthermore, as Rosemary Scott argues, two of the three main centres of Daoism, the monasteries at Longhushan and Linchuan, were located a short distance from Jingdezhen, where the current example would have undoubtedly been produced; see the Exhibition Catalogue Two rare Chinese porcelain fish jars of the 14th and 16th centuries, Eskenazi, London, 2002, p.8. The production of such jars during the Jiajing Period for the Imperial court, therefore, has particular resonance.

The particular combination of golden fish and lotus is also highly auspicious; 'goldfish with lotus' (jinyuhehe) is a homonym for 'surplus (yu), harmony (he) and wealth (jin)', see P.B.Welch, Chinese Art: A Guide to Motifs and Visual Imagery, Vermont and Singapore, 2008, p.98. Furthermore, several gold fish swimming in a pond (tang) provides a rebus for the phase jinyu mantang, meaning a household filled with jade and gold.

The present jar differs from the well-known wucai fish jars from the same period, in having underglaze cobalt blue as the predominant colour; with the golden scales and details of the carp picked out in yellow and red enamels. This technique enabled the ceramic decorators to render the lotus and aquatic plants with more texture and movement, and the fish with more realism and movement than possible with the wucai palette.

Several related examples of this rarer type of fish jar are known in the collections of prominent international museums. A very similar jar in the Palace Museum, Beijing, with a later Yongzheng period replacement cover, is illustrated in Gugong Bowuyuan Cang Wenwu Zhenpin Quanji 35: Qinghua Youlihong 2, Hong Kong, 2000, p.251, fig.227. An example complete with its original cover was acquired by the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, in 1936 and is illustrated by R. Kerr (ed.), Chinese Art and Design: The T.T. Tsui Gallery of Chinese Art, London, 1991, p.164, pl.72. Another example, again without its cover, in the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco is illustrated by He Li, Chinese Ceramics: The New Standard Guide, San Francisco, 1996, p.231, fig.453. For another example, without a cover, see Mayuyama, Seventy Years Vol.1, Tokyo, 1976, p.281, fig.843.

Besides the present example, it appears that only one other Jiajing 'fish' jar of this rare palette has been sold at auction. A similar enamelled blue and white example, complete with its original cover, was sold at Christie’s Hong Kong, 29 September 1992, lot 484, and again at Christie's London, 12 November 2002, lot 79. A rare unfinished jar, painted in underglaze blue with water weeds and aquatic plants but without the enamelled fish, was sold at Christie's Hong Kong, 16-17 January 1989, lot 599.

Bonhams. Fine Chinese Art, 14 May 2009. New Bond Street www.bonhams.com (Copyright © 2002-2009 Bonhams 1793 Ltd., Images and Text All Rights Reserved)