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Can you tell me how old this Chinese 'Mei ping' 'famille noire' porcelain vase is ? It has the mark of Hsüan Tê in the bottom, but is obviously much younger than the emperor. Can you tell me more about it ?

New York Metropolitan Museum Research Scholar and former Curator of Chinese Ceramics Suzanne G. Valenstein writes in her Met-published "A Handbook of Chinese Ceramics": "The possibilities of painting porcelains with colored enamels, which were so successfully developed during the Ming dynasty, were exploited to the fullest in the Qing period." Of colors that became known in the West as 'famille verte', the biscuit-painted sub-palettes painted on black and yellow grounds, respectively earned the names 'famille noire' and 'famille jaune'.

I checked my Mainland-published dictionary of historical porcelain marks and find that four-character Xuande marks were used during the reign and onward, but none of the Ming marks, period or otherwise, have the spurious horizontal stroke between the heart and eye radicals, which form most of the lower right side of the "De" character.

The marks dictionary shows a Qing Yongzheng-era (1723-35) porcelain with a faux Xuande four-character mark that has what appears in a fairly indistinct picture to be the same spurious horizontal stroke. However, in my opinion, the cobalt in the mark on your meiping looks granular in a manner similar to the pigment produced domestically circa the Guangxu Reign (1875-1908). This cobalt had a consistency that could emerge from the kiln with bubble bursts at the end of strokes and the kind of clumping that gave a "heaped & piled" look to some marks like yours.

Otherwise, the decoration on your vase looks to be quite good, with the only detraction from value being an apparent kiln flaw or repair on the neck.

Best regards,

Bill H.

I thank you once again !

Hi,
Just to say that this is a very nice item,beautifully decorated and with a nice mark.

I believe that this is a 19th c piece and one of the nicest famille noir I've seen in a long while.

Maybe Guangxu or slightly earlier.

I have a Tongzhi Vase with almost identical motif of bat and flower.

Vic

Many thanks for your answer ! Bill H. believes it's a Guang Xu vase too.

Here are a couple of pieces of mine with the same bat and flower motif.
1st Tongzhi,
2nd I believe Xianfeng.

Many thanks for the photos. There are similarities with the pattern on my 'famille noire'. I don't know which province in China mine comes from.

Steffen

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