An exceptionally rare and magnificent pair of wucai 'fish' jars and covers, Marks and period of Jiajing
Lot 32. An exceptionally rare and magnificent pair of wucai 'fish' jars and covers, Marks and period of Jiajing (1522-1566). Overall height of larger 45.8 cm. Estimate 600,000 - 1,000,000 GBP. Lot Sold 9,630,000 GBP. © Sotheby's 2024
the base of each jar with a six-character mark in underglaze blue, wood stands (6).
Provenance: In Haus Rosselhöh, Wiesbaden, by 1926, and thence by descent.
Literature: Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration, Wohnungskunst, Malerei, Plastik, Architektur, Gärten, Künstlerische, Frauen, Arbeiten, Haus Rosselhöh in Wiesbaden [German Art and Decoration, Residential Art, Painting, Sculpture, Architecture, Gardens, Artistic, Haus Rosselhöh in Wiesbaden], Darmstadt, 1926.
Modernes Haus im zeitlosen Stil [Modern House in a Timeless Style], ca. 1953.
ELYSIAN CALM FOR A DAOIST EMPEROR
Regina Krahl
The colourful ponds on these jars emit such positive vibrations that they instantly brighten up their environment. The transparent waters, which let us follow the quiet movement of golden carp and a rich flora of lotus and other plants swaying in tune, cannot fail to have a soothing effect on our minds. The bold, unaffected painting style and the pleasing roundness of their form are designed to make these massive vessels irresistibly endearing. Potters and painters working for the Jiajing Emperor (r. 1522–1566) knew how to evoke the Elysian calm that he strove to achieve and that his Daoist masters endeavoured to convey to him.
At the Jiajing court, Daoist adepts held a powerful sway over the Emperor. What had begun as a search for fertility drugs, since the Emperor was without a son, over time turned into a broader search for immortality elixiers. From 1542 onwards the Emperor retreated from the political turmoil of the Forbidden City to imperial gardens further west, and devoted himself completely to the pursuit of immortality. Much building work of temples and palace halls was undertaken to this effect and ceramics were commissioned at such unprecedented scale that the imperial workshops were unable to fulfil all orders and had to rope in commercial kilns to boost the output. This partial out-sourcing of the manufacture of imperial porcelains must have had an invigorating effect and favoured innovation of a porcelain industry, which during the previous periods, Hongzhi (1488–1505) and Zhengde (1506–1521), had hardly developed.
In the Jiajing period, large quantities of ceramics were ordered both for daily life, including many complete food services, and for Daoist worship. The Order List of imperial porcelains, which is preserved except for the records of the first and the last seven years of the reign, shows that – at least in the years between 1529 and 1559 – the vast majority of orders were for blue-and-white porcelains, including an order for two hundred underglaze-blue jars with carp in lotus pond design in the year 1542, and the rest is for monochrome or bi-chrome vessels.[1] That no orders for polychrome vessels are found is most likely not due to taste than to availability. It suggests that they were hardly made in the years covered by the extant records, but probably largely in the last seven years of the reign. That polychromy in general was highly appreciated is corroborated by the many brightly coloured Daoist paintings of the period.[2]
Polychrome porcelain was not new in the Jiajing reign, but the kilns at Jingdezhen, Jiangxi province, had never achieved anything approaching the grandeur of these ‘fish jars’. The first successful experiments with wucai, ‘five colour’, decoration, combining underglaze blue with overglaze enamels, date back to the Xuande reign (1426–1435) and the Chenghua period (1465–1487) saw a successful production line of fine but very small items in a related polychrome style (doucai, ‘dovetailed colours’); from the Hongzhi and Zhengde periods hardly any wucai (or doucai) is known. Archaeological exploration of the kiln sites has in recent years brought to light evidence for an astonishing amount of experimentation during the Interregnum (1436–1464), a period, whose lack of reign marks had suggested a total gap of imperial production. Unearthed have been fragments of highly ambitious, large garden seats with openwork decoration, painted in underglaze blue and bright enamel colours, but no complete examples of such works seem to have seen the light of day.[3] Jingdezhen’s potters had never before successfully created such large polychrome vessels; and they had never used this colour scheme with its orange tones and with black enamel.
What makes Jiajing ‘fish jars’ visually stand out is the striking golden-orange enamel colour, developed to do justice to the splendid appearance of China’s beloved golden carp. An invention of the Jiajing potters, and peculiar to that period, the application of iron red over an already fired yellow enamel made the working procedure laborious. It was at the same time also used for some smaller jars, but although it is uniquely suited to depict the golden scales of fishes, it was soon abandoned again, probably because it was considered too onerous. Colour realism as achieved on these jars had otherwise never been a particular concern of the porcelain painters, until much later, in the eighteenth century, the enamel palette had been much enlarged.
The new black pigment was judiciously used in the present design for rendering outlines and details, as well as the fishes’ distinct eyes. More remarkable, however, is its subtle employment to indicate the lateral line of the carp, a line of pored scales that runs midway across their bodies and represents a sensory system vital to their orientation and detection of movement. Such detailed observation of nature is not found on earlier painted porcelains, and not even in ink paintings.
The Daoist addiction of the Jiajing Emperor was clearly so universal that it informed not only the officialdom at court, but all imperial institutions and thus also the various imperial workshops. From the 1540s onwards, Daoist motifs became ubiquitous on Chinese works of art. Many porcelains were produced specifically for use in Daoist rituals, some are even inscribed to the effect,[4] and a majority bears the emblematic symbols of longevity popular in Daoist lore, like Immortals, trigrams, deer, cranes, pines, peaches, lingzhi, etc. Peter Lam has researched the development of the Jiajing imperial reign mark and detected Daoist influence even there. The style of script used for the marks on the present jars he identified as ‘Daoist charm script’.[5]
The decoration of our ‘fish jars’ is special as it is not composed of short-hand Daoist tokens, but its scenic depiction of fish in their natural habitat relates a story. Fish were a frequent subject of Daoist allegories and one of the most popular is the well-known passage in the book Zhuangzi, of the fourth century BC, which renders a witty exchange between the Daoist master and Huizi, a Confucian scholar, about the pleasures of fishes, which Zhuangzi begins and triumphantly ends, obviously having retained the upper hand:
“See how the minnows come out and dart around where they please! That’s what fish really enjoy!”
“You’re not a fish – how do you know what fish enjoy?”
“You’re not I, so how do you know I don’t know what fish enjoy?”
“I’m not you, so I certainly don’t know what you know. On the other hand, you’re certainly not a fish – so that still proves you don’t know what fish enjoy!”
“Let’s go back to your original question, please. You asked me how I know what fish enjoy – so you already knew I knew it when you asked the question. I know it by standing here beside the [river] Hao.”[6]
Ink paintings of fishes had long been a popular genre of literati painting and that they were not simply observations of nature but direct references to Daoist thinking already long before the Jiajing reign corroborates a painting of fishes by Zhou Dongqing, of 1291, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which the painter has inscribed with a colophon beginning “Not being fish, how do we know their happiness?” (fig.2 ).[7]
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Fig. 2. The Pleasures of Fishes, Zhou Dongqing, dated 1291 © Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
We do not know what function these jars would have had in the Jiajing Emperor’s palace. Guan jars, as this shape is known, are often called wine jars, which may be correct, but in the court’s Order Lists of porcelains, which included requests for thousands of jars (including a single order of 10,000 jars with dragon-and-phoenix design), their purpose is unfortunately not stipulated.
Guan jars are not included among special commissions of sacrificial vessels, and the lotus-pond decoration of the present pieces would in any case seem too picturesque to have been suitable for Daoist rituals.
While the assemblage of items in pairs is otherwise not typical of the Ming period, it is noteworthy that Jiajing ‘fish jars’ had been preserved as pairs in several old collections, of which at least one and probably two (Grandidier and Henry James) are going back to the Qing dynasty (1644–1911). The present pair has been in the same German family collection for about a century, if not longer. It can be seen in situ in the ‘Ladies room’ of the family home in Wiesbaden, Germany, which was destroyed during the War, as illustrated in a German magazine on art and interior decoration, Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration, vol. XXIX, published April 1926 (fig. 1). The pair can be seen again in the family living room in an article on the villa after it was rebuilt, dating from the early 1950s. The jars have never been published on their own.
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Fig. 1. Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration, Wohnungskunst, Malerei, Plastik, Architektur, Gärten, Künstlerische, Frauen, Arbeiten, Haus Rosselhöh in Wiesbaden [German Art and Decoration, Residential Art, Painting, Sculpture, Architecture, Gardens, Artistic, Haus Rosselhöh in Wiesbaden], Darmstadt, 1926.
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Fig. 1a The jars in situ in the newly built house, as featured in an architecture magazine, ca. 1953
Jiajing ‘fish jars’ are very rare altogether, extremely rare with cover, and no other pair – with or without covers – appears to remain in a private collection. Of seven known pairs of such jars, three had retained and four had lost their covers. Only one other complete pair with covers appears to be preserved, from the collection of Ernest Grandidier (1833–1912), and now in the Musée Guimet, Paris (accession nos G4117a and b; fig. 3), see Oriental Ceramics. The World’s Great Collections, vol. 7, Tokyo, New York, and San Francisco, 1981, col. pl. 22, where one jar is illustrated. The other two pairs are now split. Only three single jars in private hands are known to have retained their covers, the two from the J.M. Hu collection and the one formerly in the Walters collection, see below.
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Fig. 3. A pair of wucai ‘fish’ jars and covers, Marks and period of Jiajing, Musée Guimet, Paris © GrandPalaisRmn (MNAAG, Paris) / Thierry Ollivier
A pair of Jiajing ‘fish jars’ with covers from the collection of Henry Walters (1848-1931) and later in the Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, is now split, with one jar remaining in the Museum, illustrated in Hiram W. Woodward, Jr, Asian Art in the Walters Art Gallery. A Selection, Baltimore, 1991, pl. 23; the other sold in our New York rooms, 11th / 12th September 2012, lot 262 (cover lot).
The third pair with covers, from the collection of J.M. Hu (1911–1995), is also separated, with one jar sold at Sotheby’s New York, 4th June 1985, lot 12 (cover lot); the other sold twice in our rooms, in New York, 1st December 1992, lot 282 (cover lot) and in Hong Kong, 29th October 2000, lot 18 (both times at the world record price), and a third time, from the Le Cong Tang collection, at Christie’s Hong Kong, 27th November 2017, lot 8006 (back cover) (fig. 4).
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Fig. 4. J M Hu (1911 - 1995)
A pair without covers is recorded in the Hakutsuru Art Museum, Kobe, illustrated in Hakutsuru Bijutsukan zōhin zuroku [Illustrated Catalogue of Pieces in the Hakutsuru Fine Art Museum], Kobe, 1988, pls 121 and 122.
A sixth pair of jars without cover in the Museu Medeiros e Almeida, Lisbon, is illustrated in Maria Antónia Pinto de Matos, The RA Collection of Chinese Ceramics. A Collector’s Vision, London, 2011, vol. 1, p. 216, fig. 32.
One further pair, both severely damaged, perhaps during a palace fire, from the collection of famous author Henry James (1843–1916), later the collection of Charles A. Dana and the Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, was sold separately at Christie’s New York, 19th March 2009, lot 719 (with virtually no red enamel remaining) and lot 721 (with replaced neck).
A single jar and cover of this design, excavated in 1955 in Chaoyang District, Beijing, is now in the National Museum of China, Beijing, published in Zhongguo Guojia Bowuguan guancang wenwu yanjiu congshu/Studies on the Collections of the National Museum of China. Ciqi juan [Porcelain section], Mingdai [Ming dynasty] Shanghai, 2007, pl. 84; an example in the Palace Museum, Beijing, is illustrated in Gugong Bowuyuan cang wenwu zhenpin quanji. Wucai, douc.ai/The Complete Collection of Treasures of the Palace Museum. Porcelains in Polychrome and Contrasting Colours, Hong Kong, 1999, pl. 15.
These jars all share the same basic design and layout of eight fishes, all belonging to the carp family, four larger alternating with four smaller ones, two of each heading right and two left, some swimming straight ahead and others just switching direction, their bodies twisted in a swirling motion. The surrounding lotus plants and water weeds are equally following a roughly predesigned pattern, with the underglaze-blue details that had been painted on before glaze application and firing, providing guidance for the painters of the polychrome enamels. The painting styles on these jars, however, are very free and spontaneous and vary immensely, suggesting the involvement of a sizeable number of painters.