THE PROPERTY OF A GENTLEMAN
A RARE EARLY MING LARGE BLUE AND WHITE BOWL, finely painted in characteristic greyish-blue tones with areas of 'heaping and piling', with a central medallion containing five lotus blooms variously painted in profile and 'full-faced', on a scrolling vine within a key-fret band, the well with four floral sprays depicting budding and blooming chrysanthemum, camellia, peony and pomegranate below a classic-scroll border around the rim, the exterior painted with a band of scrolling peony between a lotus petal and key-fret band around the base and a lingzhi scroll around the rim, Hongwu

细节
A RARE EARLY MING LARGE BLUE AND WHITE BOWL, finely painted in characteristic greyish-blue tones with areas of 'heaping and piling', with a central medallion containing five lotus blooms variously painted in profile and 'full-faced', on a scrolling vine within a key-fret band, the well with four floral sprays depicting budding and blooming chrysanthemum, camellia, peony and pomegranate below a classic-scroll border around the rim, the exterior painted with a band of scrolling peony between a lotus petal and key-fret band around the base and a lingzhi scroll around the rim, Hongwu
42.5cm.

拍品专文

No other bowl of this pattern appears to be published.

Bowls of this size and shape exist both in underglaze-blue and in copper-red with varying arrangements of the decorative motifs. It is quite rare, however, to find upright floral sprays painted in the well above a medallion with a floral scroll. The opposite is seemingly easier to execute and although the types of flowers vary between peony, chrysanthemum with sprays in the medallion and scrolls around the well, this group of bowls is most always painted in this order.

Compare with a related underglaze-blue painted bowl in the National Palace Museum, Taibei, with floral sprays within the central medallion encircled by a peony scroll at the well and a lingzhi scroll below the rim, the exterior painted with a chrysanthemum scroll below a wave band at the rim, illustrated in Blue and White Ware of the Ming Dynasty, Book 1, p1.1, 1a-b. Another from the J.M. Addis collection is illustrated by Adrian Joseph, Ming Porcelain, pl.15, and painted with a spray of two chrysanthemum below a wide lotus scroll and a thinner composite. A third in the Freer Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., is illustrated by Daisy Lion-Goldschmit, La Porcelain Ming, pl.24, with a peony scroll on the exterior and a lingzhi scroll below the rim, each with a band of petal panels enclosing a pencilled flower around the base above key-pattern around the foot.

The central medallion in this example, painted with the flowers of the four seasons around a central lotus, was a particularly successful arrangement that was later used extensively on the medallion of Yongle period dishes.