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Hello,
Can anyone tell me what this is and anything about the maker's mark on the bottom?
It is about 13cm wide, 11cm tall, and the 3 legs are about 6.5cm tall.
Thank you

The mark is apocryphal, alleging your Chinese censer was "Made during the Xuande Reign of the Great Ming Dynasty" (大明宣德年製 - da ming xuan de nian zhi). It actually is much newer.

Due to the high quality and fame of bronzes cast during the Xuande years (1426-35), subsequent generations of Chinese bronzesmiths developed an enduring tradition of applying this mark to many of their wares, unfortunately not only to the good but also the bad and the ugly. This censer, which also bears a wannabe "CHINA" mark beneath the main one, sadly belongs to the latter category.

However, the censer may well belong to another historic period in China, that being the "Great Leap Forward" of 1958-61, when Chairman Mao rallied the population to undertake innovative industrial production efforts in order to boost China from its agrarian economy into the ranks of international industrial powers. Small steel mills, other metal foundries and cottage industries blossomed in backyards, but largely failed due to a lack of technical and management skills. Your roughly cast and decorated piece bears all the earmarks of possibly dating to that era.

From the technical standpoint, there also is a noteworthy flaw in the way the mark is written, wherein the character for "de" (德 - virtue), has a horizontal stroke across the middle of its right side. This stroke doesn't appear in Xuande period marks, wherein "de" is written as 徳 instead of 德.

Best regards,

Bill H.

Thank you for taking time to reply!

This is a very old topic but what Bill said might not be true. Sorry.
Official coins in Ming dynasty show horizontal stroke.

http://www.forumancientcoins.com/gallery/displayimage.php?album=1497&pos=98
http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/collection_object_details.aspx?objectId=3311510&partId=1&matcult=15513&page=1

I've reviewed the question and believe that Ming coinage may not have been regulated in the same manner as marks on bronze utensils and porcelain wares. There is no doubt that official porcelains of the Xuande and Zhengde periods used marks without the horizontal stroke between the "heart and eye" elements of the "De" character, and I believe marks for palace porcelain wares were the subject of decrees that popular kilns also were bound to follow.

In my opinion, ritual bronzes probably were subject to the same kind of regulations. However, Sotheby's has lately restricted its archives, so I can't verify my recollection of having seen Xuande period bronze religious images made for Tibet also with the same variant of "De". However, I can verify that Xuande marks assigned to religious bronzes during the Qing dynasty occasionally used the same variant that was used on Ming porcelains. If I can pin this question down further, I'll post the additional info.

Thanks,

Bill H.

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