|
Subject:Seeking Opinions on Probable Shiwan Dragon Bowls with Jiajing Mark
Posted By: Bill H Mon, Feb 09, 2015 IP: 98.71.198.75
This is one of a pair of heavy 8-inch square pottery bowls of the same form and decoration acquired recently at an estate sale. They look to me to be Shiwan products, probably no older than the late Qing to Republic era (ca 1875-1949) but possibly post-1950.
This form of bowl with dragon decoration was known during the Jiajing period (1522-1566), although most I found online were blue & white, and nothing else popped up with green dragons on yellow in a square bowl. I came across one yellow bowl with an incised Jiajing mark, but the characters were linear and not calligraphically well carved like the six-character marks on this pair of bowls.
The artistic style seems to me to be more like the Kangxi era that late Ming, particularly the visage of the dragons. Most of these creatures I found on Jiajing bowls used jagged lines instead of scales on the bodies of dragons. The claws, however, are a fair likeness of what the late Ming and early Qing beasts brandish. The bowl I'm showing here is more evenly decorated than the other, but as a pair, they rate fairly high on my scale of display-worthiness.
My tour of archives at Sotheby's, Christie's and Live Auctioneers produced no other exact match for these bowls, which reputedly had spent "ages" in the same collection. Were these bowls contemporary, I would have expected to locate one or two, especially in the broad-based records of liveauctioneers.com. So my question is whether anyone else has encountered anything like them that might help me refine my dating. Anyone see a possibility of the Qing Jiaqing or Daoguang era.
Thanks,
Bill H.
|