Lot 98. A blue-and-white porcelain jar with autumn grasses, Joseon dynasty, first half 18th century, 12 5/8 in. (32.1 cm.) high. Estimate USD 700,000 - USD 800,000 © Christie’s Images Limited 2017.

The ovoid form, delicately painted in underglaze-blue with four autumn grasses, the shoulder with four auspicious-character roundels representing longevity (Su), good fortune (Bok), good health (Gang) and peace (Nyeong), the mouth rim with incised line, the body applied with a lustrous transparent overglaze. 

Provenance: Private collection, West Japan, acquired in the 1960s.

Note: Used as storage vessels and occasionally as vases for monumental floral displays at banquets and ceremonies, such large, broad-shouldered, narrow-waisted jars were popular in Korea from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries. Some feature landscape decoration, while others boast dragons, tigers, haetae, or other favored beasts, and yet others sport floral designs or auspicious Chinese characters. Made in the eighteenth century, this jar features four blossoming plants, each growing from a continuous, if minimally indicated, ground line, the plants interspersed with roundels emblazoned with auspicious Chinese characters reading from right to left (in Korean pronunciation) su, bok, gang, and nyeong, which mean—and which offer wishes to the viewer for—longevity, good fortune, good health, and peace.

This jar’s form doubtless finds distant inspiration in meiping vessels created in China during the Northern Song period (960–1127). Despite the poetic name meaning “plum vase,” meiping (Korean, maebyeong) vessels were not originally used as vases for the display of cut branches of blossoming plum but were elegant storage bottles for wine and other liquids. Korean potters of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, during the Goryeo dynasty (918–1392), gave the maebyeong form its classic interpretation, with broad shoulders, narrow waist, and lightly flaring foot.  

Crafted in both porcelain and buncheong stoneware, the maebyeong form persisted into the Joseon dynasty (1392–1910), following its own evolutionary path. Dated by inscription to 1489, a monumental Korean blue-and-white porcelain jar with pine and bamboo décor in the collection of Dongguk University Museum, Seoul (National Treasure no. 176; See: In Blue and White: Porcelain of the Joseon Dynasty, Seoul: National Museum of Korea, 2015, p. 14, no. 3), reveals that by the late fifteenth-century the maebyeong vessel had evolved from slender-necked bottle into wide-mouthed jar; it further reveals that in the transformation from bottle to jar, such vessels saw both an increase in size and a change in proportions, the shoulder becoming ever broader, presumably to accommodate the wider mouth. As evinced by a porcelain jar embellished with a branch of fruiting grapevine painted in underglaze iron brown, the jar now in the collection of Ewha Women’s University Museum, Seoul (National Treasure no. 107), seventeenth-century potters gave the jar form the robust interpretation that would continue through the end of the dynastic era. Unique to Korea, jars with bulging shoulders and gently curved side walls that descend to a constricted base were ubiquitous during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. Formally termed jun in Korean, this jar shape is sometimes also called a “moon jar”—dal hangari —though that name technically should be reserved for large round jars whose globular shape recalls a full moon. 

Seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century examples have a short, vertical, collar-like neck and an exaggerated profile, with massive shoulders and constricted waist; of closely related form, those from the second half of the eighteenth century display a less exaggerated profile that incorporates a gentle S-curve, and they have a slightly higher neck; that classic form continues into the first decades of the nineteenth century. Jars from later in the nineteenth century, by contrast, exhibit a more mannered profile with narrower shoulders, an attenuated body, a beveled foot, and a tall, cylindrical neck.  

The Chinese characters that embellish this jar are clearly written and easily readable, but the flowers are more difficult to identify, as they are sketchily rendered and are all depicted with the same grass-like leaves. Although many authors simply identify the motif as “floral designs” or generically term all the flowers “orchids”, the careful differentiation of the blossoms from plant to plant permits an attempt at more specific identification. Thus, the flower between the su and bok roundels might be identified as an orchid, the flower between the bok and gang roundels as dianthus—commonly known in English as pinks—that between the gang and nyeong roundels as narcissus, and that between the nyeong and su roundels as chrysanthemum. All cultivated in East Asia, those flowering plants frequently appear in Chinese and Korean paintings. Such jars, sparsely but delicately painted with favored plants and embellished with auspicious characters, were very much in the taste of Korean literati of the Joseon dynasty. 

Korean potters began to produce blue-and-white ware —i.e., porcelain with designs painted in underglaze cobalt blue—as early as the fifteenth century, in imitation of Chinese porcelains of the early Ming period (1368–1644). Most extant Korean porcelains from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries feature designs painted in underglaze iron brown, but blue-and-white ware appeared in quantity again in the late seventeenth century and would dominate the later Korean ceramic tradition.  

The cobalt-blue of the best Chinese porcelains ranges from dark royal to navy blue, but that of the finest Korean porcelains wares typically is a pale, almost silvery, blue, as evinced by designs on this jar. The decorative schemes on Chinese wares generally are continuous, stretching all the way ’round the vessel; by contrast, the decoration on Korean porcelains often is discontinuous, with discrete design elements appearing around the vessel. The Korean wares’ lack of borders—or, if used, very simple borders—stands in marked contrast to the elaborate top and bottom borders characteristic of Chinese wares. In addition, from the fifteenth century onward, the painting on the best Korean porcelains closely approximates that on paper and silk. 

Two closely related jars appear in the collection of the National Museum of Korea, Seoul (don 351 and don 465). Two additional jars, both closely related, are in the collection of the Museum of Oriental Ceramics, Osaka (acc. nos. 20454 and 20601), and the collections of the Kyoto National Museum, Kyoto, and the Nezu Institute of Fine Arts, Tokyo, each include one related jar. In addition, two related jars are in the Samsung Collection at the Ho’am Museum, Yong’in, Korea. Similar in shape, all of these jars sport the same four flowering plants, the blossoms differentiated in exactly the same manner; some have a ground line from which the plants grow, others do not. Only the jar in the National Museum of Korea (don 465) also has roundels with Chinese characters reading su, bok, gang, and nyeong; the others lack those decorative elements. One jar in the Ho’am Museum has two roundels, one placed immediately above the other, with Chinese characters reading ju jun, meaning “wine jar.”
Robert D. Mowry