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On a recent trip, I had the fortune to find this 3.75 inch-tall blue & white Chinese gourd-form water dropper for $125 in one of the newer antique malls along my route. Decoration is Kangxi-style lotuses on a scrolling vine ground, with ruyi scepter heads around the mouth and a diaper of battens about the bottom. It isn't marked except for a Kangxi-type blue circle on its base. I believe it probably is late 19th century, when this kind of lotus enjoyed a great deal of popularity. Were it flawless, I'd call it Republic, but the top of its dropper does have small glaze separations of the type often seen on post-Taiping Rebellion Qing porcelains, particularly Tongzhi to Guangxu-era pieces.

I was surprised when digging into the Live Auctioneers and other online archives not to find anything else of similar form and decoration. Nor did I find other droppers with a top like this one, consisting of a hollow unglazed cylinder with glazed cap, apparently designed for a user to dip the cylinder into the water and transfer it to an inkstone while holding a finger over the opening in the cap.

Of course I may have it wrong. There are some black stains on the unglazed cylinder to suggest that the item might have been used as a bottle for prepared ink. I'd welcome thoughts on these suppositions and ruminations.

Here's the link to images on my photo-sharing site in case the forum Link URL finds it too long to accept:

https://onedrive.live.com/redir?resid=F1C6AAB5A0BE3294!1319&authkey=!AAiQoX9F86CHlik&ithint=folder%2cjpg

Best regards,

Bill H.

Link :BW Lotus Water Dropper

Looks 19th century from the blue under glaze colour that is dark with a hollow line in between, thick bubbly glaze and the broken bubbles and i think someone has used it as a ink dropper instead. did you get this one in a antique mall in China. You can sometimes pick a genuine article but these days the fakes are getting so good it is hard to tell from the genuine. they pop up at auctions in the west with reign marks some auction houses are full of these types of replicas. They are auction off undated but when the genuine article pops up folks do not have confidence to bid as they think it might be the sophisticated replica especially if the auctioneer is not confident enough the put a date on it. You can buy these at a bargain to major auction houses, if you can be sure it is genuine. However I am pretty confident you item is genuine from the features.

Thanks, Lee. Appreciate your input. This dropper came from a mall in the Southeastern USA. The Mall itself is new, but the dealers there are all veterans of the antique trade. The seller is from a family that used to run heir own shop, and while I didn't get a chance to ask, I believe the dropper may have been old stock or from the family collection.

Here's a 4.75 inch-wide bowl I'd put on an out-of-the-way shelf and almost forgotten about. It has a café-au-lait exterior glaze and an interior with blue and white lotus scroll that reminds me quite a bit of the dropper, except less well developed arabesque pattern. It has a period-looking Guangxu mark on the base. The sticker is my catalog number.

Best regards,

Bill H.

This one looks correct mark and period guangxu bowl. The gold lacquer repair is commonly used by Japanese so it must come from a japanese collection.

I should have mentioned, the gilt filled spots on the rim are my own impermanent repairs.

Bill H.

Water droppers come in all kinds of shapes. The blue color would make it late Qing, I think.
The base is a bit off the normal, though, for a Chinese item. If supports (stilts) were used, why are they completely round?

Appreciate the observations. Looking closely at the spur marks through a loupe doesn't tell for sure why the spur marks are so well rounded, though I suppose they could have been smoothed down using a corundum tipped tool to remove ragged glaze edges where the firing supports were broken away. Dirt or ink residue that has settled around the edges of these spur marks tends to accentuate their shape. As to the irregularities in the blue circle on the base, the white glaze flow on the bottom appears to have been heavier to the one side, carrying with it some cobalt in an area where there already was extra pigment from overlap in the brush line.

Best regards,

Bill H.

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