well potted with soft rounded sides resting on a low splayed foot, covered with a rich layer of creamy-white slip and a glossy transparent glaze stopping short of the foot revealing the pale buff body, the interior vibrantly painted with a carp in bright iron-red enamel in front of a lotus flower with red bloom and green leaf and further green water weeds, surrounded by red and green bands, the red accentuated by yellow dots, the green enamel partly iridescent, the centre of the interior showing a ring of five spur marks repeated on the footring

Provenance: Collection of Eugene Bernat.
Sotheby's New York, 7th November 1980, lot 125.
Sotheby's London, 11th May 2011, lot 4.

Exhibited: Chinese Ceramics of the Sung Dynasty, Currier Gallery of Art, Manchester, New Hampshire, 1959, cat. no. 98.
Chinese Art, Smith College Museum, Northampton, Massachusetts, 1962, cat. no. 136.
Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, Massachusetts, on loan.
Chūgoku tōji. Bi wo miru kokoro/ Chinese ceramics, Enlightening through Beauty, Sen-Oku Hakuko Kan, Kyoto, 2006, cat. no. 28.

Literature: Jan Wirgin, 'Sung Ceramic Designs', Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities, no. 42, Stockholm, 1970, pl. 56 g.

Note: This bowl is outstanding for its freely painted motif of fish, rendered in bold strokes of overglaze red and washes of green enamel. During the Northern Song and Jin periods, polychrome painted wares appeared at various Cizhou kilns, particularly those in Henan province. These bowls required two separate firings; first the vessel was covered by a layer of transparent glaze over a layer of white slip and fired, then the lead-based enamels were applied to the surface and the piece was fired a second time. Such colourfully painted vessels represent China’s first polychrome painted ceramics and are thus of great historical importance.

A bowl with a similar fish among water plants, but lacking the yellow dots, from the Linyushanren Collection, was sold at Christie’s Hong Kong, 2nd December 2015, lot 2832; a slightly coarser example is illustrated in Jingcai. Jin Yuan hong lu cai ciqi zhong de shenqi yu shixiang/Splendid. The Deities and Secular World in Polychrome Overglaze Decoration Ceramics of Kin and Yuan Dynasties, Beijing, 2009, pl. 197, together with a bowl painted with a similar design on a green ground, pl. 196; and a third in the Sekido Museum of Art, Tokyo, is published in Asahi Shimbun, Song Ceramics, Tokyo, 1999, pl. 108.