A Rare Qingbai Carved Figural Pillow

SOUTHERN SONG DYNASTY

细节

A Rare Qingbai Carved Figural Pillow
Southern Song dynasty
The slightly arched oval top fluidly carved with an undulating peony stem bearing three large blossoms surrounded by leaves within a plain border, supported on a leaf-carved columnar support rising from behind an elegant lady reclining with head resting on her hand atop a shaped rectangular base impressed with a six-character mark within a rectangle, the curved toe of one of her shoes peeking out from beneath the hem of her loose robes, her face well modeled and her hair dressed in a loop set at a rakish angle to one side, all covered with a glaze of pale bluish tone
9in. (23cm.) long

拍品专文

The six-character mark reads: Yuan ben ye jia zhi fu.

A nearly identical pillow, but carved on top with a design of two boys amidst peonies, is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and illustrated in Oriental Ceramics, The World's Great Collections, Tokyo, 1977, vol. 12, pl. 23. This pillow also bears a mark enclosed in a rectangle that consists of the last four characters in the mark of the present lot; this mark has been translated 'master of the house of Ye', ibid., p. 302.

A related pillow, recovered from the Sinan wreck off the coast of Korea, was included in the Special Exhibition of Cultural Relics Found off the Sinan Coast, National Museum of Korea, Seoul, 1977, col. pl. 22.