An extremely rare doucai 'grape' saucer dish. Mark and period of Chenghua.  Photo Sotheby's

delicately potted with steep rounded sides and a straight foot, the interior freely painted with a medallion of twisted vines bearing thick bunches of purple grapes, the leaves all in green and the tendrils in yellow, all outlined in underglaze blue, the exterior painted with four branches of peach, rose, possibly persimmon and gardenia, all further outlined in underglaze blue, with the fruits in yellow with patches of red enamel, the gardenia in underglaze blue, the roses in red, all the foliage in green and the stems in brownish aubergine, the base inscribed within a six-character reign mark in a double square; 8.4 cm., 3 1/4 in. Estimate 8,000,000-12,000,000 HKD

PROVENANCE: Eskenazi Ltd, London.

LITERATURE: Regina Krahl, Chinese Ceramics from the Meiyintang Collection, London, 1994-2010, vol. 4, no.1668.

NOTE: A large number of broken dishes of this type are said to have been excavated from the third and latest Chenghua stratum of the waste heaps of the Ming imperial kilns at Jingdezhen, but despite this abundance of discarded examples, only few such dishes appear to have passed the strict monitoring process at the manufactories and to have survived until today. No piece except for the present dish seems to be preserved outside the National Palace Museum, Taipei (see the listing by Julian Thompson in The Emperor's broken china. Reconstructing Chenghua porcelain, Sotheby's, London, 1995, p. 118, no. D 45).

One such dish in the National Palace Museum was included in the Museum's exhibition Ming Chenghua ciqi tezhan [Special exhibition of Ming Chenghua porcelain], Taipei, 1977, cat. no. 197 (illustrated as no. 196); two others in the exhibition Chenghua ciqi tezhan / Special Exhibition of Ch'eng-hua Porcelain Ware, 1465-1487, National Palace Museum, Taipei, 2003, cat. nos. 182 and 183.

One reconstructed dish of this design from the Jingdezhen kiln site was included in the exhibition A Legacy of Chenghua: Imperial Porcelain of the Chenghua Reign Excavated from Zhushan, Jingdezhen, The Tsui Museum of Art, Hong Kong, 1993, cat. no. C 117. This stratum is believed to date from the 1480s, and Li Yiping states, ibid., p.322, that small dishes of this type were in the late Chenghua period made in large quantities, to be used at banquets for resting chopsticks, together with matchingly decorated stem cups, covered tea cups and barrel-shaped bowls. A group of small doucai dishes of this form but with various designs is illustrated ibid., p. 77, fig. 22a. 

The grape motif was particularly popular for Chenghua imperial porcelain, and according to Ts'ai Ho-pi ('Chenghua Porcelain in Historical Context', in The Emperor's broken china, op. cit., p. 21), a contemporary painter, Yue Zheng (AD 1418-72), specialized in and was renowned for this genre. Compare also Chenghua cups and stem cups with the grape motif, illustrated in the Taipei catalogue, 2003, op.cit., cat. nos. 177-81, where the branches, leaves and fruit are, however, very differently rendered. Much Chenghua porcelain was copied in the Kangxi period (AD 1662-1722), and so was this design; compare a dish with a spurious Chenghua reign mark in the Palace Museum, Beijing, in Geng Baochang, ed., Gugong Bowuyuan cang gu taoci ciliao xuancui [Selection of ancient ceramic material from the Palace Museum], Beijing, 2005, vol. II, pl. 73.

 Sotheby's. The Meiyintang Collection, Part III - An Important Selection of Imperial Chinese Porcelains. Hong Kong | 04 Apr 2012, 10:15 AM www.sothebys.com