Lot 61
Treasury 6, no. 1164 (‘Lavender-Blue Legend’)
HK$52,500

Lavender-blue glaze on porcelain; with a convex lip and convex foot; moulded on one main side with a peasant leading King Wen 文 and one of his retainers towards Jiang Ziya 姜子雅, who is seated on the other side fishing in a broad waterway, all the exterior surfaces covered with lavender-blue glaze, turning whitish where the underlying relief is highest and around the upper neck rim; the inner neck unglazed, but the interior covered in a thin lavender-blue glaze
Jingdezhen, 1770–1800
Height: 5.47 cm
Mouth/lip: 0.71/2.00 cm
Stopper: coral; silver collar

Provenance:
Sotheby’s, London, 11 October 1974, lot 105
Hugh M. Moss Ltd, (1974)
Eldred’s, 21 August 1997, lot 273
Jin Hing, Los Angeles (2001)
Hugh Moss (HK) Ltd (2002)

Published:
Treasury 6, no. 1164

Although an unmarked monochrome may be difficult to date accurately, we have Sale 7, lot 142 and the reign-marked group to which it belongs to establish this mould as a late-Qianlong one. A puzzling difference between this bottle and that is that here the interior is glazed, whereas the other is not. This indicates that the presence or absence of interior glaze in the mid- and late-Qing periods should not be used as an absolute determinant of dating, even if we knew precisely when the initial shift from glazed to unglazed interiors and the reverse in the early nineteenth century occurred.

The subject here is King Wen’s discovery of the strategist who would help him overthrow the Shang dynasty, Jiang Ziya, also known as Lü Shang 呂尚.

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.