19 – SMBM4
Description
Pair of Chinese imperial porcelain yellow ground bat bowls, wan, thinly potted of steeply rounded form on tall, gently splayed foot rims, each incised on the exterior with twelve iron-red bats in flight, heightened in white enamel, each suspending from its mouth a pale green speckled double-gourd tied with a blue enamel ribbon, amongst dense ruyi-head clouds, between bands of upright ruyi-head terminal petals at the foot and beneath a ruyi-head band and single incised green line at the rim, the interior glazed yellow.
Each base with a six-character mark of Yongzheng within a double ring in underglaze blue and of the period, 1723-1735.
5 ⅞ inches, 15 cm diameter.
Provenance & Additional Information
- Purchased by Richard Marchant circa 1965.
- An identical bowl from the British Rail Pension Fund was sold by Sotheby’s Hong Kong in their auction of Important Chinese Porcelain, Enamels and Jade Carvings from the Works of Art Collection of the British Rail Pension Fund, 16th May 1989, lot 78; another from the Constantinidi Collection is illustrated by Soame Jenyns in Later Chinese Porcelain, London, 1971, LXIX, fig. 3, and also by Julian Thompson in Sotheby’s Hong Kong, Twenty Years, Hong Kong, 1993, no. 369, p. 245; another is illustrated in Porcelains with Cloisonné Enamel Decoration and Famille Rose Decoration, The Complete Collection of Treasures of the Palace Museum, Volume 39, Hong Kong, 1999, no. 83, p. 95.
- The bat, fu, has the same sound in Chinese as the word for “blessings” and “riches”, making the bat one of the most popular rebuses in Chinese When depicted with bottle gourds, hulu, they form the rebus fulu shuangquan, “may you have both blessings and wealth”. When bats are in flight, they sometimes appear to be upside down, dao, this is a pun on the word “arrived”, therefore meaning “blessings have arrived”. Bats amongst clouds, yun, form the rebus fu yun, “may you have good fortune and luck”. Red bats, hongfu, flying in the sky, tian, form the rebus hongfu qitian, “may your blessings be as vast as the sky”.
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