A fine blue and white ‘sanduo’ garlic-mouth bottle vase, Seal mark and period of Qianlong. Photo: Sotheby's.

the pear-shaped body rising from a spreading foot to a tall waisted neck with a garlic-head mouth and straight lip, painted in bright cobalt-blue tones in the ‘heaped and piled’ effect, the body with alternating flowering and fruiting branches of the sanduo ('The Three Abundances'), pomegranate, citron and peach, arranged in two registers, all above band of upright lappets, the neck encircled by a band of pendent lappets each enclosing double trefoil motifs above a key-fret band and pendent ruyi-heads, the mouth decorated with a floral scroll below a key-fret band at the rim, the foot skirted with a band of waves, inscribed to the base with a six-character seal mark; 28 cm., 11 in. ESTIMATION 3,000,000-5,000,000 HKD. Unsold

Provenance: Sotheby’s Hong Kong, 20th May 1987, lot 63.

The elegant design of branches of flowers and fruit of the present vase is inspired by a motif created in the Yongle period (1403-24), in which six or ten fruiting sprays were painted on meiping. Meiping depicting ten branches were larger in size, painted with ruyi panels on the shoulder and lappets at the foot and potted with matching covers while their smaller uncovered counterparts featured six branches between a lappet band and stiff leaf border at the shoulder and foot respectively. This Qing vase combines the two slightly varying designs by placing the two registers of branches between lappet bands. Moreover, the floral sprays decorating the cover of the larger meiping have been cleverly incorporated by the Qing craftsmen to adorn the bulbous head. 

 A closely related example, in the National Palace Museum, Taipei, is illustrated in Blue and White Ware of the Ch’ing Dynasty, bk. II, pl. 5, one is published in Geng Boachang, Ming Qing ciqi jianding, Hong Kong, 1993, p. 118, fig. 157; another, included in the exhibition Ming and Qing Porcelain from the Collection of the T.Y. Chao Family Foundation, Hong Kong Museum of Art, Hong Kong, 1978, cat. no. 91, was sold in these rooms, 18th November 1986, lot 81; and a fourth example was sold in our New York rooms, 30th March 2006, lot 314. Vases of this type were first produced in the Yongzheng period and continued to be made throughout the Qing dynasty; for the Yongzheng prototype see one sold in these rooms, 29th November 1978, lot 234; a Jiaqing version sold at Christie’s New York, 19th September 2006, lot 308; and Daoguang vase, from the Edward T. Chow and the Yanzhitang collections, sold in these rooms, 19th May 1981, lot 549, and again at Christie’s Singapore, 30th March 1997, lot 201.