A famille verte 'Birthday' Dish. Mark and period of Kangxi.  Photo Sotheby's

the shallow rounded sides with an everted rim brightly painted with a branch of jujubes bearing five-petal blossoms in pale aubergine, red fruit and leaves finely shaded in green, set with a green praying mantis on one branch, its slender legs balancing on the leaves, its head raised with alert eyes and long antennas, the finely meshed wings tucked along the body with tail pointed up, on a branch below a grey and black beetle sits eating a leaf, all enclosed within the iron-red border on the rim with flower-heads reserved on a honeycomb diaper ground, interspersed with the characters wan shou wu jiang ('boundless long life') in four pale red cartouches, the base inscribed with a six-character reign mark within underglaze blue within a double ring; 25 cm., 9 7/8 in. Estimate 500,000-700,000 HKD. Lot 19 vendu: 1,940,000 HKD

PROVENANCE: Christie's London, 12th December 1977, lot 198.
Christie's Hong Kong, 29th April 2002, lot 553.
Sotheby's Hong Kong, 31st October 2004, lot 103.
Eskenazi Ltd, London.

LITTERATURE: Anthony du Boulay, Christie's Pictorial History of Chinese Ceramics, London, 1984, p. 227, fig. 2.
Regina Krahl, Chinese Ceramics from the Meiyintang Collection, London, 1994-2010, vol. 4, no. 1727.

NOTE: Dishes of this finely painted type, and inscribed with a wish for long life in the rim border, are believed to have been made for the Kangxi Emperor's sixtieth birthday in AD 1713, and Peter Lam has argued that they were still made during Lang Tingji's time as supervisor of the imperial kilns ('Lang Tingji [1663-1715] and the Porcelain of the Late Kangxi Period', Transactions of the Oriental Ceramic Society, vol. 68, 2003-4, p. 40). They are known with a great variety of designs, often depicting ladies, or nature scenes with birds, but examples with insects are rare. 'Grasses and insects' (i.e. insects and plants) is a traditional category of Chinese ink painting, and a similar theme of a praying mantis and beetle by a fruiting branch is already found on a Song dynasty album leaf by Li Di (active 12th century), entitled Insects and Autumn Plants included in Cao zhong hua tezhan tulu / Special Exhibition of the Insect Painting,
National Palace Museum, Taipei, 1986, pl. 2 (fig. 1).

One companion dish is in the Tianjin Municipal Art Museum, illustrated in Tianjin Shi Yishu Bowuguan cang ci /Porcelains from the Tianjin Municipal Museum, Hong Kong, 1993, pl. 133. A dish with a grasshopper on a stem of peas, from the Bennett collection, is illustrated in W.G. Gulland, Chinese Porcelain, London, 1911, vol. II, pl. 635; another with a bee hovering around a flowering branch, from the collection of Donald S. Morrison, was sold in our New York rooms, 18th June 1980, lot 421.

'Birthday' dishes with four different motifs from the Sir Percival David Collection are in the British Museum, London, see Illustrated Catalogue of Qing Enamelled Wares in the Percival David Foundation of Chinese Art, rev. ed., London, 1991, nos. 812, 890, 891 and A 836; others with a bird on a fruiting branch are, for example, in the Musée Guimet, Paris, illustrated in Xavier Besse, La Chine des porcelaines, Paris, 2004, pl. 35; and in the Gulexuan collection, published in Regina Krahl with Clarissa von Spee, Chinese Ceramics from the Gulexuan Collection, Lünen, 2003, pl. 99 and illustrated also on the dust jacket. 

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