Lot 846. A rare blue and white circular plaque, Chenghua period (1465-1487); 10 1/8 in. (25.7 cm.) diam. Estimate USD 20,000 - USD 30,000. Price realised USD 35,000. © Christie's Images Ltd 2014

The slightly convex plaque is delicately painted in outline and wash with a scene of Guanyin shown seated on a fringed mat facing an acolyte with outstretched hands, each on a rocky promontory jutting above a lotus plant emerging from wind-tossed waves below. To the other side of Guanyin is an amphora in a basin and a parrot perched in bamboo. The reverse is unglazed. 

Provenance: Alfred E. Guntermann (1943-2013) Collection.

Note: This finely painted circular plaque was probably intended to be inset into a screen or other item of furniture. The Buddhist subject matter, refined style of painting, and the fine quality of the body, unctuous glaze and cobalt are typical of the mature Chenghua style and suggest that the plaque was made in the latter part of the Chenghua reign. It was during this period, from 1481-1487, that the finest Chenghua porcelains were produced, and as the archaeologist and scholar Liu Xinyuan has noted in A Legacy of Chenghua, Hong Kong, 1993, p. 87, the underglaze blue wares are painted "in a softly elegant style which typifies the period." It was also during this period that Buddhism once more came to prominence under the influence of Tibetan lamas at court.

Compare the blue and white circular plaque (11½ in. diam.), dated to the Chenghua period, sold at Christie's New York, 15-16 September 2011, lot 1477, which was painted in a similar style with a scene of three scholars and two attendants in a landscape, with a pavilion emerging from behind clouds in the distance. The same style of painting can also be seen on a rectangular plaque dated to the Chenghua period from the du Boulay Collection of Chinese Ceramics sold at Bonhams, London, 10 November 2003, lot 103.

Christie's. FINE CHINESE CERAMICS AND WORKS OF ART, 18 – 19 September 2014, New York, Rockefeller Plaza