Lot 119. A slip-decorated brown-glazed Henan pear-shaped vase, Jin dynasty (1115-1234). Estimate 50,000 — 70,000 USD. Photo Sotheby's

set on a slightly splayed foot, the globular body rising to a long narrow neck and flared rim, applied overall with a variegated dark-brown glaze, mottling to a russet-green and thinning at the rim to a pale brown, boldly painted on each side of the body in a russet iron-oxide slip with a stylized bird in flight, the glaze stopping neatly around the foot to expose the light gray stoneware body. Height 10 7/8  in., 27.6 cm

Notes: Pear-shaped vases of this type were produced by the northern kilns during the Jin and Yuan dynasties. A similar example, dated to the Jin dynasty, was included in the exhibition Hare's Fur, Tortoiseshell and Partridge Feathers, Arthur M. Sackler Museum, Cambridge, Mass, 1994, cat. no. 52, where the author Robert Mowry notes that the decoration of only two birds in flight finds parallels with painted Cizhou wares depicting floral sprays of the 12th century, ibid, p. 160. See a Cizhou truncated meiping painted with two large peony leaf sprays formerly in the collection of Hans Popper, included in the exhibition Freedom of Clay and Brush through Seven Centuries in Northern China: Tz'u-chou Type Wares, 960-1600 A.D.,Indianapolis, 1980, cat. no. 89.

Bottles of related shape and decoration, with the birds sometimes stylized to the extent that they are misidentified as flowers, include one in the British Museum, illustrated in Margaret Medley, Yuan Porcelain and Stoneware, London, 1974, pl. 109A; one in the collection of the Kunstindustrimuseet, Copenhagen, included in the exhibition Mostra D'Arte Cinese, Venice, 1954, cat. no. 507; and two others illustrated in Mayuyama. Seventy Years, vol. I, Tokyo, 1976, pls 592 and 593.

The dating of this lot is consistent with the result of a thermoluminescence test, C-Link Research & Development Limited, Hong Kong, sample no. 4593CE08.

Sotheby's. Important Chinese Art, New York, 13 sept. 2016, 10:30 AM