Lot 76. A pair of yellow-ground green-enamelled ‘Crane’ bowls, Yongzheng Marks And Period (1723-1735); 15cm., 5 7/8 in. Estimate  30,000 — 50,000 GBP. Lot sold 98,500 GBP. Photo: Sotheby's.

each with rounded sides rising from a straight foot to a gently flaring rim, incised and painted to the exterior with eight cranes variously in flight, their heads surmounted by a red crest and their bodies enamelled in white with details picked out in black, interspersed by billowing clouds above foaming waves cresting against rocky mountains painted in green enamels, all reserved on an egg-yolk yellow ground, the white base inscribed with a six-character reign mark within a double-circle. Quantité: 2

Provenance: Collection of Sir Alfred Beit (1903-1994). 

Note: A closely related example from the Qing Court collection and still in Beijing is illustrated in The Complete Collection of Treasures of the Palace Museum. Porcelains with Cloisonné Enamel Decoration and Famille Rose Decoration, Hong Kong, 1999, pl. 84; one in the Baur collection is published in John Ayers, Chinese Ceramics in the Baur Collection, Geneva, 1999, pl. 204; a third bowl from the Warre Collection is included in R.L. Hobson, The Later Ceramic Wares of China, London, 1925, pl. LIX, fig. 3; and another in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, is illustrated in A Handbook to the W.G. Gulland Bequest of Chinese Porcelain, London, 1950, pl. VIa. 

A pair of bowls of this type, from the Hall Family Collection, was sold in our Hong Kong rooms, 2nd May 2000, lot 546; another, published in Sotheby's Hong Kong Twenty Years 1973-1993, Hong Kong, 1993, pl. 370, was sold in our Hong Kong rooms, 15th May 1990, lot 299, and again at Christie's Hong Kong, 29th May 2007, lot 1364; and a third pair from the collection of Virginia H. Rogers, was sold in our New York rooms, 17th/18thSeptember 2013, lot 346.