A pair of famille-verte 'figural' dishes. Qing dynasty, early 18th century - Sotheby's

each with shallow rounded sides merging with the low tapered foot and the flat everted rim, delicately painted with figural scenes in soft famille-verte enamels and picked out with butterflies, peach blossoms and petals on the rim, the first with the scholar Meng Haoren riding through snow on a donkey, followed by an attendant on foot carrying a flowering prunus branch, the other depicting two ladies in a garden working on scrolls in front of pierced rocks, bamboos and shrubs, the exterior left undecorated, the base inscribed in underglaze blue with a spurious six-character Chenghua marks within a double ring; 17.2 and 17.5 cm., 6 3/4  and 6 7/8  in. Estimation: 360,000 - 500,000 HKD

PROVENANCE: Collection of The Hon. Irwin Boyle Laughlin (1871-1941), Meridian House, Washington, D.C.
By descent to his widow, Therese Iselin Laughlin (d. 1958).
By descent to their daughter, Gertrude Laughlin Chanler (1914-1999), Genesco, New York (until 1959).
Sotheby’s London, 30th June 1959, lot 81.
Sotheby’s New York, 1st June 1988, lot 177.

LITTERATURE: Regina Krahl, Chinese Ceramics from the Meiyintang Collection, London, 1994-2010, vol. 2, nos. 773-4.

NOTE: Dishes of this type, with butterfly and leaf decoration on the rim and various freely drawn figure scenes in the centre, are believed to have been made for the Kangxi Emperor’s 60th birthday in 1713, and some of them are inscribed with reign marks, but the majority is not.

A similar dish of Kangxi mark and period in the Shanghai Museum is illustrated in Wang Qingzheng, ed., Kangxi Porcelain Wares from the Shanghai Museum Collection, Hong Kong, 1998, pl. 92; another in R.P. Marchant, ‘Some Interesting Pieces of Marked Ch’ing Porcelain’, Bulletin of the Oriental Ceramic Society of Hong Kong, no. 3, 1977-8, pls. 1-3.

A dish with a similar scene of ladies in a garden, pressing fabrics, also from the Laughlin and Chanler collections, was sold together with this pair in our London rooms, 30th June 1959, lot 84; and another dish with a scholar and boy on horseback was sold in our New York rooms, 7th December 1983, lot 362.

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