Lot 104. A fine Ru-type peach-shaped washer, Seal mark and period of Qianlong (1736-1795); 24.9 cm., 9 3/4 in. Estimation: 2,500,000 - 3,500,000 HKD. Lot sold 4,580,000 HKD. Photo Sotheby's

the shallow flat-base washer potted in the shape of a peach with irregular incurved sides and a wavy profile, set to one side with a large ripe peach modelled in the round attached to a branch with two flat leaves resting on the rim,  covered overall in a thick greyish-blue glaze suffused with a fine network of crackles, the base inscribed with a six-character reign mark in underglaze blue and encircled by six tiny spur marks along the perimeter.

Provenance: Acquired in Shanghai in the 1930s and 1940s.

Exhibited: Zandelou Qingdai guanyao danseyou ciqi/Qing Imperial Monochromes. The Zandelou Collection, Shanghai Museum, Beijing Museum and Art Museum, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2005, cat. no. 30.

Literature: Helen D. Ling and E.T. Chow, Collection of Chinese Ceramics from the Pavilion of Ephemeral Attainment, vol. III, Hong Kong, 1950, pl. 163 right (one of a pair).

Note: A Yongzheng prototype of this design from the Qing court collection, with a guan-type glaze and with a dark body visible through the glaze, is in the Palace Museum, Beijing, illustrated in The Complete Collection of Treasures of the Palace Museum. Monochrome Porcelain, Hong Kong, 1999, pl. 207, together with a Qianlong piece with a white porcelain body, pl. 217, and a third washer with a crackled ge-type glaze but without reign mark, pl. 232, all slightly differently shaped.

Another Ru-type brush washer of this form, of Qianlong mark and period, also from the J.M. Hu collection and probably the pair to the present piece, illustrated together with it in Ling and Chow, op.cit., pl. 163 left, was sold in our New York rooms, 4th June 1985, lot 58, and in these rooms, 14th November 1989, lot 210; and a third piece previously in the collection of J.M. Hu and later in the Meiyintang collection of slightly smaller size, illustrated in Regina Krahl, Chinese Ceramics from the Meiyintang Collection, London, 1994-2010, vol. 4, no. 1800, was sold in these rooms, 7th April 2011, lot 37.