Lot 208
Treasury 6, no. 1386 (‘Gone Fishing’)
HK$37,500

Colourless glaze on cobalt and copper on porcelain; with a convex lip and recessed flat foot with a convex footrim; painted under the glaze with a continuous landscape scene that fills all space below the neck, with the sun, five geese, and some wispy clouds starting the design on the shoulder, below which is an open pavilion positioned below the sun and birds on a wide shelf amid rounded shapes that represent variously rocks and hills and overlooking a distant mountain silhouette above a fisherman striding across a reddish patch on the bank of a river of conventional wave designs that rings the lower part of the bottle, two fish held out in his right hand, his rod tied to his back, and his left hand raised as if to beckon to a scholar sitting with his rod on the prow of a small skiff that moves toward him in the river below and to our left, past a house in a grove of trees that reaches back up to the shoulder, the boat being propelled by a boy on the stern oar with a large fish basket at his feet; the foot, lip, inner neck, and interior glazed
Jingdezhen, 1830–1890
Height: 5.72 cm
Mouth/lip: 0.70/1.65 cm
Stopper: glass; pearl finial; vinyl collar

Provenance:
Hugh Moss (HK) Ltd (1985)

Published:
Kleiner, Yang, and Shangraw 1994, no. 176
Treasury 6, no. 1386

Exhibited:
Hong Kong Museum of Art, March–June 1994
National Museum of Singapore, November 1994–February 1995

This is good example of the phenomenon of a grey tint to the glaze when underglaze red is present. The effect, also observable in lot 144 of this auction, is exaggerated here by the dense patterning that leaves very little white space. The landscape has become a symphony of texture, pattern, and colour filling the surface; rather than a balance between areas painted and areas left white to suggest water, mist, and sky, so familiar to us in literati painting from the Yuan dynasty onwards, the artist has sought a dynamic play between areas of different textures or patterns and among artfully placed areas of red amidst the blue. This bottle suggests that the designers of those bottles, even if they felt a lingering obligation to ape the literati style, were more attuned to pattern than to the evoking of space.

Were they responding to the tastes of their growing numbers of non-elite customers? If so, what would shape those tastes? Was the Chinese eye becoming accustomed to Western perspective, in which the landscape is seen from a single vantage point, with distant objects usually placed behind and between foreground objects, rather than above them? Or were the artists groping toward an alternative way to use the traditional lexicon of brushstrokes and shapes without having to endlessly miniaturize literati compositions designed for surfaces many hundreds of times larger in scale? We may or may not someday find evidence of people in these crafts discussing such considerations, and if we do it won’t be in the terms we use today. But it is clear that at some point a customer or a kiln director looked at these crowded landscape compositions and said simply, ‘I like it. Let’s see more of these’.

Although the densely painted blue has a slightly grey appearance, it is very well controlled, with sharp lines where the artist needed them and a range of washes to define forms. The red is also varied, ranging from a brilliant, vibrant copper red to almost grey. The red of the tree trunks fades from dark red at the base to a paler tint as it blends into the branches and foliage. The area around the feet of the shore-bound fisherman is paler in the middle and darker around the edges. This may be designed to give it the three-dimensional, convex form that one would expect of a boulder, though such realism would also demand that the fisherman stop walking so cheerfully toward the edge. The gradation is equally explainable as a means to avoid the flat heaviness that a rather large cell of uniform tone would have in the design; it keeps the space ‘alive’.

This is not the Sotheby’s sale catalogue. This is a product of Hugh Moss for the purposes of this website. For the catalogue details please refer to Sotheby’s website or request a copy of a printed sale catalogue from Sotheby’s.