CHINE, DYNASTIE MING, MARQUE À SIX CARACTÈRES DANS UN DOUBLE CERCLE EN BLEU SOUS COUVERTE ET ÉPOQUE XUANDE (1426-1435)

This very rare iron-brown decorated dish belongs to an important group of dishes decorated in a distinctive style which was developed at the imperial kilns during the Xuande reign. These dishes bore a relatively large-scale floral spray in the centre and four flowering or fruiting sprays around the cavetto. On the exterior the dishes were decorated either with a floral scroll or with floral sprays. Each of the decorative elements had a generous amount of white space around it. The flower, gardenia, is native to China, and it has been suggested that when combined, as in the present example, with other fruits and flowers the general meaning is one of fruitful abundance, cf. S. Pierson, Designs as Signs: Decoration and Chinese Ceramics, Percival David Foundation of Chinese Art, p.25, where the author illustrates a similarly decorated Hongzhi-marked dish. Two brown-decorated dishes of this pattern of Xuande mark and period, one with designs in dark brown, the other in a paler café-au-lait tone, are illustrated in Mingdai Xuande guanyao jinghua tezhan tulu/ Catalogue of the Special Exhibition of Selected Hsüan-te Imperial Porcelains of the Ming Dynasty, National Palace Museum, Taipei, 1998, cat. nos. 194 and 195.
A rare later version of this design of Hongzhi mark and period (AD 1488-1505) is in the Sir Percival David Collection in the British Museum, illustrated in Oriental Ceramics: The World's Great Collections, Tokyo, New York, San Francisco, 1980-82, vol. VI, col. pl. 36; and a similar fragmentary Hongzhi dish from the imperial kiln site is illustrated in Jingdezhen chutu Mingdai yuyao ciqi [Porcelains from the Ming imperial kilns excavated at Jingdezhen], Beijing, 2009, pl. 105.