A rare famille-verte ‘Birthday’ dish, Kangxi mark and period - Sotheby's

the shallow sides rising from a tapering foot to an everted rim, delicately enamelled to the interior with a goose gliding over a small gaggle of three geese feeding and squawking among bamboo and waterweeds beside a pond, encircled at the rim in iron-red with lotus florets and roundels enclosing the charactersWanshou wujiang (Limitless longevity) on a honeycomb diaper ground, the base with a six-character mark within a double-circle, Japanese wood box. Quantité: 3 - 25.3cm., 10in. Estimation: 120,000 - 180,000 GBP

PROVENANCE; Christie’s London, 12th December 1977, lot 203.

The Jingguantang Collection.
Christie’s Hong Kong, 3rd November 1996, lot 587.

EXHIBITED: Splendour of the Qing Dynasty, Hong Kong Museum of Art, Hong Kong, 1995, cat. no. 162.
In Pursuit of Antiquities. Min Chiu Society Thirty-fifth Anniversary Exhibition, Hong Kong, 1995, cat. no. 134.

LITTERATURE: Anthony du Boulay, Christie’s Pictorial History of Chinese Ceramics, London, 1984, p. 227, pl. 2.
The Tsui Museum of Art, The Tsui Museum of Art. Chinese Ceramics, vol. IV, Hong Kong, 1995, pl. 100.

NOTE: Dishes of this finely painted type and inscribed with a wish for long life in the rim border are believed to have been created for the Kangxi emperor’s sixtieth birthday in 1713. They are known with a great variety of designs, often depicting ladies, insects or nature scenes with birds. Peter Lam, in ‘Lang Tingji (1663-1715) and the Porcelain of the Late Kangxi Period’, Transactions of the Oriental Ceramic Society, vol. 68, London, 2003, p. 40, argues that dishes of this type continued to be made during Lang Tingji’s time as supervisor.

Further designs belonging to this group of dishes include a bird on a fruiting branch, such as one in the Musee Guimet, Paris, illustrated in Xavier Besse, La Chine des Porcelaines, Paris, 2004, pl. 35; insects amongst branches, seen on a dish from the Meiyintang collection, sold several times at auction and most recently in our Hong Kong rooms, 4th April 2012, lot 19; and the goddess Magu with an attendant, as depicted on a dish in the Palace Museum, Beijing, published in Kangxi. Yongzheng. Qianlong, Hong Kong, 1989, p. 69, pl. 52. ‘Birthday’ dishes with four different motifs from the Sir Percival David collection are in the British Museum, London, published in Illustrated Catalogue of Qing Enamelled Wares in the Percival David Foundation of Chinese Art, London, 1991, pls 812, 890, 891 and A836.

Sotheby's. Fine Chinese Ceramics and Works of Art. London | 15 mai 2013 - www.sothebys.com