Lot 47. A fine small silver stemcup, Tang dynasty, late 7th-early 8th century, 5.5cm., 2 1/8 in. Estimate 6,000 — 8,000 GBP. Lot sold 50,900 GBP. Photo: Sotheby's.

the rounded bowl rising from a short knopped stem and wide flared foot, the body finely chased and engraved with a meandering scrolling vine bearing palmettes and trefoil-shaped leaves, fruit and tendrils, all within a broad central register bordered by narrow silver bands between similar simplified scroll bands encircling the base and rim, a saw-tooth band encircling the flange at the base of the body, the decoration all reserved on a minutely circle-punched ground. WEIGHT 36g.

Exhibited: Chinese Gold and Silver in the Carl Kempe Collection, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., 1954-55, cat. no. 102.

Note: Engraved silver stemcups of this form are conceived after Sassanian gold and silver prototypes. Bo Gyllensvard in 'Tang Gold and Silver', Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities, no. 29, Stockholm, 1957, pp. 64-65, notes that the form was also copied in India and is depicted in one of the Ajanta cave paintings. Margaret Medley in Metalwork and Chinese Ceramics, London, 1972, p. 5, mentions the adaptation by the Chinese of the Persian stemcup first as a novelty and then as a vessel appropriate to religious purposes in the seventh century. She illustrates ibid., pl. 5, an engraved Tang silver cup together with a Sassanian prototype.  

A cup of this type with chased decoration consisting of lotus scrolls against a ring matted background, from the collection of the Hon. Hugh Scott, was included in the China Institute in America exhibition Early Chinese Gold and Silver, China House Gallery, New York, 1971, cat. no. 47, together with another cup decorated with a design of birds surrounded by lotus scrolls on a similar ground, from the same collection, cat.no. 64, the latter sold in these rooms, 14th July 1981, lot 8, and again in our Hong Kong rooms, 19th November 1984, lot 11, from the collection of Dr. Ip Yee.   

Jessica Rawson in 'The Ornament on Chinese silver of the Tang Dynasty', British Museum Occasional Paper, no. 40, pp. 15-16, discusses the vine scroll, a popular ornament in Central Asia, which had already reached China by the fifth century A.D. and enjoyed renewed favour from the beginning of the Tang dynasty. Rawson illustrates a vine scroll inhabited with birds from cave 12 at Yungang, datable to the late fifth century, ibid., pl. 44, together with a Tang silver box in the City of Bristol Museum and Art Gallery decorated with vine scrolls, pl. 45, datable to the seventh or eighth century.   

Sotheby's. London, Masterpieces of Chinese Precious Metalwork: Early Chinese Gold and Silver, 14 May 2008