Located in Downingtown, PA
A fine Chinese Export porcelain punch bowl, Yongzheng–early Qianlong period, circa 1735–1740, painted in the famille rose palette with a distinctive version of the "Hundred Antiques" theme, unusual for its focus on furniture and precious objects rather than figures. Around the exterior are ranged a canopied couch and red-lacquer scholar's stands set with vases, flowering branches, and jardinières of peonies, together with tables bearing brush pots, censers, and boxes — a catalogue of the furnishings and treasures of the cultivated Chinese interior, giving the bowl an almost interior-portrait quality. The interior is centered with a beribboned vase of flowers within a cell-diaper and floral-panel border.
The famille rose palette — named for the opaque rose-pink enamel derived from colloidal gold, introduced in the 1720s — transformed export porcelain in the second quarter of the 18th century. Bowls of the 1730s such as this, painted at the transition from the Yongzheng to the Qianlong reign, are among the most delicately enamelled of all export wares. The "Hundred Antiques" was a favored auspicious theme, a gathering of objects emblematic of scholarship and good fortune; the present bowl's emphasis on domestic...
Category
1730s Chinese Chinese Export Antique Porcelain Decorative Objects