Lot 70. An Archaic Bronze Wine Vessel, You, Late Shang Dynasty-Western Zhou Dynasty, 12th-11th Century BC; 9 5/8 in. (24.5 cm.) high overall. Estimate GBP 60,000 - GBP 80,000. Price realised GBP 299,250. © Christie's Images Ltd 2019.

The vessel is finely cast with a broad pear-shaped body standing on a splayed foot with a loose over-head arched handle. It is boldly decorated in relief with raised flanges to the sides dividing large taotie masks on the body below a band of confronted kui dragons to the shoulder. The domed cover is decorated with raised flanges separating two taotiemasks above a band of kui dragons, and is surmounted by a bud finial. The inside of the cover and the interior base of the vessel are cast with an inscription in intaglio readingYa Tan Fu Yi, (dedicated to Father Yi of the Ya Tan clan). 

Provenance: Acquired by the vendor's grandparents in the Middle East in the 1960s, and thence by descent within the family.

Note: The current lot was loaned by the vendor's grandparents to the British Museum in 1981 for a year for study purposes. During this time, the museum wrote to the owners expressing an interest in purchasing it. 

The you was an important wine vessel and entered the religious repertoire in the first century of the Anyang period of the late Shang Dynasty. Other examples of the same period as the present lot also display the large masks on the main decorative band flanked by shaped flanges on either side, all to accentuate its face and to draw the viewers' attention to the lower body. This arrangement is also seen on a you excavated in Hunan Ningxiang, illustrated in Kaogu, 1963.12, pp. 646-7, figs.1-2, with the upper register replaced by a band of upright lappets. See also a you in the Sackler Collection with similar decoration but with handles placed on a different axis, illustrated by R. Bagley in Shang Ritual Bronzes in the Arthur M. Sackler Collections, Washington D.C., 1987, p. 372, no. 64.

The arrangements of the flanges on the cover and sides of this vessel may be compared with the late Shang dynasty-Western Zhou period you (40 cm high) excavated from Wuming Guangxi in January 1974, illustrated in Wenwu 1978.10, p 93 and later published by Robert W. Bagley in Shang Ritual bronzes in the Arthur M. Sackler Collections, Washington, 1987, fig. 64.6, p 377.

Compare the present lot with two slightly larger you (30.2 cm. and 32.3 cm. high) dated to the late Shang-early Western Zhou dynasty with bovine mask handle terminals: one sold at Christie's New York, 20 September 2005, lot 151, and the other formerly in the Idemitsu Museum, sold at Christie's Hong Kong, 29 May 2013, lot 2172.