Chinese Export Famille Rose Tureen and Cover, Meissen-Style Harbor Scene With Cranes

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Description

Chinese Export Famille Rose Tureen and Cover, Meissen-Style Harbor Scene with Cranes
Qianlong Period, Circa 1745–1755

This circular Chinese export … Read more Chinese Export Famille Rose Tureen and Cover, Meissen-Style Harbor Scene with Cranes
Qianlong Period, Circa 1745–1755

This circular Chinese export porcelain tureen and cover is painted in famille rose enamels to each side with a group of crested cranes and other exotic birds on blue and green rockwork, the tallest heightened in gold and a further bird in flight above, beside a crenellated walled town with a tall tower, a large pine tree rising before the walls. The design closely follows a European harbor pattern current on Meissen porcelain in the early 1740s, adapted by the Chinese enameler in the famille rose palette.

The domed cover is painted with a wreath of small flowerheads around the finial and, at the shoulder, a band of scrolling foliage, iron-red strapwork and pendant beads above the shaped, molded and brown-edged rim, and it is surmounted by a fruit finial on a leafy stem. The body, its rim also brown-edged, is fitted with entwined branch handles enameled pale green, their leaf terminals in green and blue spreading onto the sides. The exotic birds are thought to derive from those appearing on Meissen porcelain of around 1740, and the walled vista, while sometimes associated with Batavia, more probably copies one of the many Meissen harbor scenes than any identifiable place.

A tureen of this size sits well as the centerpiece of a dining table or sideboard, or in a cabinet or on open shelving alongside blue-and-white or Continental porcelain, where its Meissen-derived decoration bridges Chinese export and European collections.

Dimensions
Height: 6¼ inches (15.9 cm)
Width across handles: 8½ inches (21.6 cm)

Provenance
Earle D. Vandekar of Knightsbridge.

Condition
A small chip to the rim of the cover, to the reverse, has been invisibly repaired; otherwise the tureen and cover are in good condition, the enamels bright and the gilding well preserved.

References
A related tureen, cover and stand of the same pattern but of different form has been sold by Galerie Nicolas Fournery, Paris.
For a tureen with this pattern, see Christie’s London, 22 April 1991, lot 80.
For another tureen, see Christie’s London, 2 July 2013, lot 349.
For part of a service including a tureen, see Sotheby’s New York, Property from the Collections of Lily & Edmond J. Safra, 18 October 2011, lot 705.
For a dish in the pattern, see Thomas V. Litzenburg Jr., Chinese Export Porcelain in the Reeves Center Collection at Washington and Lee University (2003), cat. 39.
For Chinese export porcelain with European decoration generally, see François and Nicole Hervouët, La porcelaine des Compagnies des Indes à décor occidental (Paris, 1986).

Historical Context
The harbor and merchant scenes known in German as Kauffahrteiszenen were developed in the Meissen painting workshop under Johann Gregorius Höroldt in the 1720s and 1730s, and by about 1740 the factory’s painters had added fanciful exotic birds to the repertoire. Meissen porcelain, itself deeply indebted to Chinese and Japanese models, was in turn sent out to Canton by European traders as patterns for copying, and Chinese enamelers reproduced these harbor and bird subjects in the famille rose palette on dinner and tea wares for the European market, tureens among them.

(Ref: NY10401-nmrx) See less