The finely potted bowl is of flaring, conical shape with a slightly everted rim. The exterior is delicately enamelled in soft pastel tones of pink, aubergine, yellow, red and green and outlined in underglaze-blue with four floral medallions, depicting the flowers of the four seasons, peony, lotus, chrysanthemum and prunus separated by a repeating design of stylised amphorae supported on foliate scrolls in red, green and yellow. The well is finely detailed with a pair of butterflies in flight over two floral sprigs within single and double-line borders, box.

Property of the Yiqingge Collection. 

Provenance: A private collection, California
Sold at Christie's Hong Kong, 8 October 1990, lot 504
A European private collection formed in the 1980s and 1990s

Note: A number of Yongzheng bowls of identical size and decoration are preserved in important museum and private collections. A similar bowl is illustrated in Porcelain in Polychrome and Contrasting Colours, The Complete Collection of Treasures of the Palace Museum, Vol. 38, Hong Kong, 1999, p. 250, no. 229. An example from the Chang Foundation is included in Selected Chinese Ceramics from Han to Qing Dynasties, Chang Foundation, Taipei, 1990, no. 141. An identical bowl in the Gulbenkian Museum of Oriental Art and Archaeology, University of Durham, is illustrated by I. L. Legeza in A Descriptive and Illustrated Catalogue of the Malcolm MacDonald Collection of Chinese Ceramics, London, 1972, pl. CXXXIX, no. 378. Another example was included in exhibition Chinese porcelain from the 15th to the 18th century, Eskenazi Ltd., London, 2006, and illustrated in the Catalogue, no. 12.