An extremely rare underglaze blue and yellow enamel ''Pomegranate' dish. Mark and period of Chenghua. Photo Sotheby's

the brightly enamelled yellow dish with curved sides and a flared rim, painted on the interior in pale underglaze blue with a large flowering pomegranate spray with two open blooms and three attendant buds on a leafy gnarled stem, encircled on the cavetto with detached branches of peach, crab apple, cherry and lychee, all drawn in outlines and coloured with blue washes, the central ribs of the leaves and other features reserved in white and details painted in blue, the exterior painted with four formal lotus sprays with the heart of the flower either hidden or revealed, the six-character reign mark horizontally inscribed in underglaze blue below the rim, all reserved against a deep egg-yolk yellow ground, the base and inside of the foot left unglazed; 29. 6 cm., 11.5/8 in. Estimate 6,000,000-8,000,000 HKD

PROVENANCE: Peter Boode, London (1948).
Collection of Lord (Rolf) Cunliffe (died 1963).
Bonhams London, 11th November 2002, lot 68 (illustrated on the back cover of the catalogue, and in situ in Lord
Cunliffe's home, p. 7).
Eskenazi Ltd, London.

LITERATURE: Regina Krahl, Chinese Ceramics from the Meiyintang Collection, London, 1994-2010, vol. 4, no. 1673.

NOTE: Blue-and-yellow dishes with this design were made from the Xuande (AD 1426-35) right through to the Jiajing period (AD 1522-66), but any examples pre-dating the Hongzhi (AD 1488-1505) and Zhengde (AD 1506-21) reigns, when they were most popular, are extremely rare. Only eight Chenghua dishes of this design appear to be extant, six of them in museum collections, and only one of these was ever offered at auction. Compared to versions from other periods, Chenghua examples excel through their exquisite porcelain, which is finer than that of virtually any other Ming reign. The extant dishes all vary considerably in execution, suggesting that they were individually completed rather than in series production, and many of them display the characteristic biscuit base, densely covered with dark brown specks, also seen on the present piece. 

Three such dishes are in the National Palace Museum, Taiwan: see Chenghua ciqi tezhan / Special Exhibition of Ch'eng-hua Porcelain Ware, 1465-1487, National Palace Museum, Taipei, 2003, cat. nos. 86 and 87; and Ming Chenghua ciqi tezhan [Special exhibition of Ming Chenghua porcelain], National Palace Museum, Taipei, 1977, col. pl.17; another from the Qing court collection is still preserved in the Palace Museum, Beijing, published in The Complete
Collection of Treasures of the Palace Museum. Blue and White Porcelain with Underglazed Red, Shanghai, 2000, vol. II, pl. 229, together with a blue-and-white example of the same design, lacking the yellow enamel, pl. 17; one in the National Museum of China, Beijing, is published in Zhongguo Guojia Bowuguan guancang wenwu yanjiu congshu /Studies on the Collections of the National Museum of China. Ciqi juan [Porcelain section]: Mingdai [Ming dynasty], Shanghai, 2007, pl. 57.

Outside Chinese museums, one Chenghua dish of this design is in the Idemitsu Museum of Art, Tokyo, illustrated in Idemitsu Bijutsukan zhin zuroku. Chgoku tji / Chinese Ceramics in the Idemitsu Collection, Tokyo, 1987, no. 174; one from the Palmer collection, is published in Soame Jenyns, Ming Pottery and Porcelain, London, rev. ed. 1988 (1953), pl. 106; and a dish from the collections of Mrs. Otto Harriman, Edward T. Chow, T.Y. Chao, later in the Chang Foundation, Taipei, included in the exhibition Mostra d'Arte Cinese / Exhibition of Chinese Art, Palazzo Ducale, Venice, 1954, cat. no. 688, was sold three times in these rooms, 31st October 1974, lot 104; 25th November 1980, lot 40; and 19th May 1987, lot 256. Another such dish, reassembled from sherds recovered from the Ming imperial kiln site, is published in Jingdezhen chutu Yuan Ming guanyao ciqi / Yuan's and Ming's Imperial Porcelain Unearthed from Jingdezhen, Yan-Huang Art Museum, Beijing, 1999, cat. no. 321, together with a blue-and-white example that was discarded before the yellow enamel was applied, cat. no. 316.

A rare prototype of this design of Xuande mark and period from the Sir Percival David Collection is in the British Museum, London, see Regina Krahl and Jessica Harrison-Hall, Chinese Ceramics. Highlights from the Sir Percival David Collection, London, 2009, pl. 35; a Zhengde-marked example is also in the Meiyintang collection, published in Krahl, op.cit. vol. 2, no. 685; and a Jiajing-marked dish from the T.Y. Chao collection is illustrated in Fujioka Ryoichi
and Hasebe Gakuji, Sekai tji zensh / Ceramic Art of the World, vol. XIV: Min/ Ming Dynasty, Tokyo, 1976, p. 218, fig.66 and p. 311, fig. 38.

Sotheby's. The Meiyintang Collection, Part III - An Important Selection of Imperial Chinese Porcelains. Hong Kong | 04 Apr 2012, 10:15 AM www.sothebys.com