Lot 14. A fine pair of doucai cups with lança characters and lotus, Marks and period of Yongzheng (1723-1735); diameter 6.1 cm., 2 1/2  in. Estimate 1,000,000 - 1,500,000 HKD (98,735 — 148,102 EUR). Lot sold 4,600,000 HKD (454,179 EUR). Courtesy Sotheby's

the steep rounded sides rising from a short tapered foot to a flared rim, finely painted in contrasting underglaze blue, red, yellow and green enamels within underglaze-blue outlines, with eight differently coloured lotus blooms interlinked with a thinly drawn foliate stem, each supporting a blue lança character, above a border of multi-coloured ruyi at the foot, the base inscribed in underglaze blue with a six-character reign mark within a double square

LITERATURE: Regina Krahl, Chinese Ceramics from the Meiyintang Collection, London, 1994-2010, vol. 4, no. 1751.

NOTE: The doucai colour scheme became popular during the late Chenghua period (1465-87), when many new designs were developed, often for small vessels. The present design closely follows a Chenghua original, as can be seen, for example, on a fragmentary Chenghua cup recovered from the waste heaps of the Ming imperial kilns at Jingdezhen, Jiangxi province, included in the exhibition A Legacy of Chenghua: Imperial Porcelain of the Chenghua Reign Excavated from Zhushan, Jingdezhen, Tsui Museum of Art, Hong Kong, 1993, cat. no. C101; and a complete cup in the National Palace Museum, Taipei, was included in the exhibition Chenghua ciqi tezhan/Special Exhibition of Ch’eng-hua Porcelain Ware, 1465-1487, National Palace Museum, Taipei, 2003, cat. no. 168.

A similar pair of Yongzheng cups from the Edward T. Chow collection, sold in these rooms 19th May 1981, lot 562, is illustrated in Sotheby’s Hong Kong – Twenty Years, 1973-1993, Hong Kong, 1993, pl. 255; and a pair from the collection of Paul Bernat, now in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, is illustrated in Oriental Ceramics: The World’s Great Collections, Tokyo, New York and San Francisco, 1980-82, vol. 10, pl. 255.

Sotheby's. The Meiyintang Collection, Part V - An Important Selection of Imperial Chinese Porcelains. Hong Kong | 08 avr. 2013 - www.sothebys.com