Description

Large Chinese porcelain blue and white saucer dish painted with two sailing boats in a mountainous river landscape scene, a ferry man in each boat transporting a lady and a gentleman with attendant respectively, beneath a twelve-character poem and the moon, all within a single line, the underside with three lingzhi sprays.

11 inches, 27.9 cm diameter.

Tianqi, 1621-1627.

Provenance & Additional Information

  • Sold by Ikeda, Tokyo, 18th October 2010.
  • The poem reads and translates: mang zhui gan qu ren zhou jian feng li zheng kai fan
    ‘Hurriedly following and chasing, people in boats are just raising the sails in the wind’.
  • Included by Marchant in their exhibition of Kosometsuke & Shonzui, 2024, no. 16, pp. 52/53.
  • A similar dish, probably from the same set, was included by Marchant in their exhibition of Transitional Wares for the Japanese and Domestic Markets, 1989, no. 3, pp. 12/3 and front cover enlargement; another is illustrated by the Iida City Art Museum, Nagano, Japan in their catalogue of The Watahan Nohara Collection, 2000, no. 61, p. 135; another is illustrated by Leung Hiu Sun Michael in the exhibition of Commissioned Landscapes: Blue & White and Enamelled Porcelains of the Seventeenth Century, 2017, no. 107, pp. 288/9, where it notes the story is from the Ming dynasty drama, Yuzan Ji (The Tale of the Jade Hairpin) by Gao Lian. In the story, a young nun, Chen Miaochang, falls in love with a scholar, who is the nephew of her abbess. The abbess refuses them permission to marry and forces the young man to sit the examinations to become an official. While he does, the nun flees from the convent with the aid of a sympathetic old boatman and crosses the river and catches up with the scholar.

Condition

  • one hairline approx. 5cm long, on top of the boatman
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