A yellow reserve blue-ground 'gardenia' dish. Mark and period of Yongzheng. Photo Sotheby's

the centre of the interior decorated with a spray of gardenia encircled by four similar sprays on the cavetto, the veins and details finely painted in white slip, the exterior similarly decorated with a continuous scroll, all beneath a vibrant egg-yolk yellow enamel reserved against a speckled navy-blue ground, the rims and base left in white, the latter inscribed with a six-character underglaze blue reign mark within a double circle; 33.5 cm., 13 1/4 in. Estimate 400,000-600,000 HKD - Lot 48 vendu: 2,420,000 HKD 

PROVENANCE: Collection of Edward G. Kennedy.
Collection of Edward Kennedy Torrington.
Christie's New York, 2nd December 1989, lot 371.

EXHIBITED: Evolution to Perfection. Chinese Ceramics from the Meiyintang Collection/ Evolution vers la perfection. Céramiques de Chine de la Collection Meiyintang, Sporting d'Hiver, Monte Carlo, 1996, cat. no. 142.

LITTERATURE: Regina Krahl, Chinese Ceramics from the Meiyintang Collection, London, 1994-2010, vol. 4, no. 844.

NOTE: This design exists also in blue with white reserves only, but whereas the blue-and-white version may be based on prototypes of the Xuande reign (AD 1426-35), the blue-and-yellow style was devised in the Yongzheng period. The Yongzheng dishes differ markedly in their technique from the Ming examples. While the Qing pieces show a speckled 'powder-blue' glaze that would have been blown onto the vessel surface through a tube covered with gauze - a form of application ideally suited for stencil reserves - the Ming prototypes show a thick, dark cobalt-blue glaze, where white reserves were much more difficult to achieve. 

A blue-and-white dish of the same design and the same provenance was also in the Meiyintang collection, illustrated in Krahl, op. cit., vol. 4, no. 843, and sold in these rooms, 7th April 2011, lot 75; another blue-and-white dish of this pattern in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, is illustrated in Suzanne G. Valenstein, A Handbook of Chinese Ceramics, New York, 1989, pl. 248; and one with a different white design in the National Museum, Beijing is published in Zhongguo Guojia Bowuguan guancang wenwu yanjiu congshu / Studies on the Collections of the National Museum of China. Ciqi juan [Porcelain section], Qingdai [Qing dynasty], Shanghai, 2007, pl. 42. Blue-and-yellow dishes of this design are very rare, but two were sold at Christie's New York, 21st September 1995, lot 650, and 19th September 2007, lot 307.

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