The interior is decorated in resist technique with paper-cut decoration of three quaterlobed flower heads reserved in brown against the variegated, milky buff ground. The exterior is covered in a ‘tortoiseshell’ glaze of dark brown color mottled in beige falling short of a knife-cut edge above the low, narrow ring foot, Japanese wood box. 

Provenance: Sen Shu Tey, Tokyo.

Literature: Sen Shu Tey, The Collection of Chinese Art - Special Exhibition ‘Run Through 10 Years’, Tokyo, 2006, p. 65, no. 81 (part).

Exhibited: Sen Shu Tey, Tokyo, The Collection of Chinese Art - Special Exhibition ‘Run Through 10 Years’, 2006.

Notes: The technique of using paper cut-outs as stencils to create resist designs was one of the innovative decorative techniques employed at the Jizhou kilns in Jiangxi province. For a discussion of the processes involved in producing these designs, see R. D. Mowry, Hare’s Fur, Tortoiseshell, and Partridge Feathers: Chinese Brown-and Black Glazed Ceramics, 400-1400, Cambridge, 1996, pp. 36-8. Mowry illustrates, ibid., pp. 248-9, no. 100, a related Jizhou bowl with three quatrefoil floral medallions on the interior, from the private collection of R. Hatfield Ellsworth, which was subsequently sold at Christie’s New York, 20 March 2015, lot 851.

Christie's. The Classic Age of Chinese Ceramics: The Linyushanren Collection, Part II. 15 September 2016, New York, Rockefeller Plaza