Chinese porcelain famille verte, wucai, large saucer dish, Kangxi period, circa 1700. Photo Marchant

with gently flared rim, painted with two seated ladies weaving silk beside a large open window in a covered building with a child watching on, a lady holding a candlestick and a tearful child holding her robes walking on a fenced path beside the wall with rockwork, water and branches in the foreground, all in a night scene beneath a new moon, stars and ruyi clouds with overhanging wutong branches, and a forty-two-character seven-column poem with an iron-red and gilt two-character seal and leaf mark. 15 ⅛ inches, 38.5 cm diameter. The base with a zhi, ‘made’, character mark within a double square, within a double ring. Price on request

Published: Published by Jan Fontein and Wu Tang in The World’s Great Collections, Oriental Ceramics, Vol. 10,   no. 250.

Sheila Keppel writes in China in 1700: Kangxi Porcelains at the Taft Museum, that Geng Zhi Tu, the first recorded paintings of the subject of ploughing and weaving in China, were painted during the Northern Song Dynasty (960-1125).

Kangxi ordered the court painter, Jiao Bingzhen, to paint a series of pictures on the subject. In 1696, he had the series issued as a wood block book, cut by Zhu Gui, titled Yu Zhi Geng Zhi Tu, or ‘By Imperial Command: Pictures of Ploughing and Sericulture’. Through publicly associating his reign with the theme, Kangxi was assuring the Chinese that he was conforming to the model of a just and conscientious ruler, thus asserting Manchu legitimacy to rule. Kangxi made his intension clear in his personally inscribed introduction to the book:

‘I also ordered engraved (woodblock) plates to be made based on the pictures… in order to show them to later generations of the Imperial House, and to officials and commoners. The pictures will enable them to realise that every grain and every piece of cloth are the production of toiling.’

In other words, if those at the court appreciated the effort involved, they would honour and protect those who laboured. In addition, Kangxi personally wrote poems to accompany each page of the book. 

A dish of this subject from the collection of the St. Louis Art Museum, no. 268:51 was included by Marchant and illustrated on the front cover in their catalogue of Recent Acquisitions, 2007, no. 33, pp. 62/3; another, from the same set of woodblock prints in the Victoria and Albert Museum, is illustrated by John Ayers and Masahiko Sato in Sekai Toji Zenshu, Ceramic Art of the World, Volume 15, Ch’ing Dynasty, no. 172, p. 170; a related dish, with a Kangxi mark, was sold by Christie’s New York in their auction of Fine Chinese Ceramics and Works of Art, 18th & 19th March 2009, lot no. 377, pp. 262/3.

A rouleau vase with two scenes of sericulture from the same woodblock prints is illustrated by Anthony du Boulay in The Taft Museum, Its History and Collections, Vol. II, Fig. 1, p. 638; a rouleau vase with another two scenes of sericulture from the same woodblock prints is illustrated by Yang Xin in Porcelains in Polychrome and Contrasting Colours, The Complete Collection of Treasures of the Palace Museum, Beijing, Vol. 38, no. 67, pp. 72/3. 

A bowl with agricultural ploughing scenes taken from the same woodblock prints is illustrated by Wang Qingzheng in Kangxi Porcelain Wares from the Shanghai Museum Collection, no. 110, pp. 164/5.