An extremely rare Famille-Noire 'Dragon' dish, Mark and period of Yongzheng. Estimate 1,000,000 — 1,500,000 HKD. Unsold. Photo courtesy Sotheby's

delicately potted with shallow rounded sides resting on a slightly tapered foot, the exterior decorated in yellow and green enamels with two five-clawed dragons soaring through flames and interrupted by a pair of lingzhi-shaped cloud swirls, their manes and scaly bodies finely picked out, all reserved on a black ground, the interior centred with a medallion enamelled in yellow and green with a further five-clawed dragon sinuously writhing amidst flames and clouds next to a flaming pearl, the base inscribed in underglaze blue with a six-character reign mark in three columns within a double-circle; 14.6 cm., 5 3/4  in.

Provenance: Collection of Leonard Gow (1859-1936), and thence by descent.

Notes: It is extremely rare to find a Yongzheng reign-marked famille-noire dish, and no precise counterpart appears to be recorded in any museum or private collection. However, a dish of identical form and closely related design from the Grandidier collection is in the Guimet Museum, accession no. G4833. Inscribed with an apocryphal four-character Chenghua nianzhi mark, it is attributed to the Kangxi period. Sharing precisely the same treatment of the central dragon to the interior, and with the rare use of a rich black background on the sides, they differ only in the precise articulation of the colour scheme of the dragons.

The style of the Yongzheng mark on the current dish, boldly inscribed in underglaze-blue in three columns, is of a type typically assigned to the outset of the Yongzheng reign. The posture and definition of the dragons themselves closely matches more commonly found Kangxi reign-marked examples, as seen on a yellow-ground and polychrome Kangxi reign-marked bowl from the Qing court collection, preserved in the Palace Museum, Beijing, illustrated in Porcelains in Polychrome and Contrasting Colours. The Complete Collection of Treasures of the Palace Museum, Hong Kong, 1999, pl. 151. Not only is the treatment of the ferocious striding five-clawed dragons similar to that on the current dish, but the style in which the Kangxi mark is written, inscribed in kaishu in three columns, precisely matches that on the current dish, and supports a dating of the dish to the very beginning of the Yongzheng reign, before the emperor’s precise requirements for Imperial porcelain produced at Jingdezhen had been decreed.

Another famille-noire dish in the Lady Lever Art Gallery, Liverpool, similarly decorated with five-clawed dragons and inscribed with apocryphal Chenghua mark, is categorised as Kangxi and illustrated by Edgar Gorer, Catalogue of the collection of Old Chinese Porcelain formed by Richard Bennett, London, 1912, no. 338. For the more commonly found series of Yongzheng reign-marked black-ground wares, see a black-ground famille-rose bowl from the collection of Sir Alfred Beit (1903-1994), sold in our London rooms, 6th November 2013, lot 77. Other examples with similarly enamelled designs consisting of flowers amongst green foliate scrolls, all with Yongzheng marks and of the period, include: a bowl decorated with a band of flowers on a leafy scroll, from the Charles Russell collection, illustrated in R.L. Hobson et. al., Chinese Ceramics in Private Collections, London, 1931, pl. 347; another from the Barbara Hutton collection, illustrated in The Barbara Hutton Collection of Chinese Porcelain, Honolulu Academy of Arts, Honolulu, 1956, pl. XIIIa; a dish in the Shanghai Museum, Shanghai, published in Zhongguo meishu quanji. Gongyi meishu bian, vol. 3, Beijing, 1988, pl. 202; and an example in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, included in Rose Kerr, Chinese Ceramics. Porcelain of the Qing Dynasty, London, 1986, pl. 23.

Sotheby's. Important Chinese Works of Art, Hong Kong, 07 avr. 2015