Lot 153. A carved 'Yaozhou' celadon-glazed 'rhinoceros' bowl, Northern Song dynasty. Diameter 18 cm. Lot Sold 8,320 USD (Estimate 6,000 - 8,000 USD) © Sotheby's 2026

Provenance: Sotheby's Arcade, lot 239 (according to label).

Note:: Rooted in ancient legend, the motif of a rhinoceros gazing upward at the moon draws on the belief that a rhinoceros' horn was formed through the animal's communion with the moon's light. In early imagination, the rhinoceros was a creature of myth, endowed with a crescent-shaped horn that served as a conduit between earth and sky, allowing it to speak silently with the heavens.

A Yaozhou bowl in the Palace Museum, Beijing, carved with a similar scene of a rhinoceros gazing at the moon, is illustrated in Gugong Bowuyuan Cang Wenwu Zhenpin Quanji, Liang Song Ciqi, I / The Complete Collection of the Treasures of the Palace Museum: Porcelain of the Song Dynasty, I, Hong Kong, 1996, vol. 32, p. 147. For a closely related example sold at auction, see one previously in the J.M. Hu Collection, and sold at Christie's New York, 25th March 2022, lot 1027.

Sotheby's. Chinese Art, New York, 25 March 2026