Lot 1902. A rare blue and white double-gourd wall vase, Mark and period of Wanli; 30.5 cm., 12 in. Estimate 1,000,000-1,500,000 HKD - Lot Sold: 1,820,000 HKD . Photo Sotheby's

the flat-back vase elegantly potted of double-gourd form, supported on a slightly flared foot, gently rising to a slender neck and lipped mouth, the lower bulb brilliantly painted in cobalt blue with a seated high official holding a ruyi, flanked by his attendants in front of a screen, surrounded by scholars and further attendants on the sides, all in a garden scene with trees and rockwork, below bands of scrolling foliage and pendant ruyi-heads, the upper bulb painted with ducks swimming in a pond, together with birds of various kinds resting and flying amongst fruiting trees springing from rockwork on the shore, the neck decorated with a key-fret border above a full-frontal dragon within a cartouche, the reverse inscribed with a six-character reign mark within a rectangular cartouche between a pendant lotus leaf and a lotus bloom. 

Provenance: Collection of T.T. Tsui, Jingguantang Collection.
Christie's Hong Kong, 5th November 1997, lot 887

Exhibited: Selected Treasures of Chinese Art, Min Chiu Society Thirtieth Anniversary Exhibition, Hong Kong Museum of Art, 1990, pp. 304-305, cat. no. 137.

Literature: Regina Krahl, 'The T.T. Tsui Collection of Chinese Ceramics', Orientations, December 1989, fig. 19 (left).

Note: A closely related vase in the Shanghai Museum is illustrated in Underglaze Blue and Red, Hong Kong, 1987, pl. 167; another in the Musee Guimet is published in Oriental Ceramics. The World's Great Collections, vol. 7, Tokyo, 1981, pl.82; and a third example, included in the Exhibition of Chinese Art, Palazzo Ducale, Venice, 1954, cat. no. 676, was sold in our London rooms, 1st November, 1966, lot 103, and again at Doyle New York, 16th September 2003, lot 99, from the F. Gordon Morrill Collection.

Margaret Medley illustrates a Wanli vase of this type in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, in 'Organisation and Production at Jingdezhen in the Sixteenth Century', Percival David Foundation Colloquies on Art & Archaeology in Asia, no. 16, pl. 11, and notes that wall vases of this form of various designs are recorded in 1592.

Sotheby's. Fine Chinese Ceramics & Works of Art. Hong Kong. 05 Oct 2011