Chinese Export Porcelain Famille Rose Plate With Ribbon-Tied Peony Bouquet

Details

Description

Chinese Export Porcelain Famille Rose Plate with Ribbon-Tied Peony Bouquet
Early Qianlong Period, Circa 1736–1750

The plate is painted in … Read more Chinese Export Porcelain Famille Rose Plate with Ribbon-Tied Peony Bouquet
Early Qianlong Period, Circa 1736–1750

The plate is painted in the famille rose palette with a bouquet at the center, its stems bound with a ruby-red ribbon whose ends flutter to either side: two large ruby-pink peonies, a smaller pink peony and buds, a pink-and-white daisy-like chrysanthemum and a yellow chrysanthemum head, among green and turquoise leaves, russet-brown maple-like leaves and blue buds. The well and cavetto are left white. The rim carries four panels of turquoise cell diaper, each bordered in blue and yellow and pointed inward with a pink triangle, with a pink peony at the outer edge, alternating with four scroll-edged cartouches filled with a sepia scrolling diaper, each with a white prunus blossom and blue and green leaves, flanked by pink lotus flowers; the edge is lined in brown. The reverse is plain, the foot rim unglazed and the base unmarked, as is usual for export porcelain of the period.

The ribbon-tied bouquet and the rim of diaper panels and scrolled cartouches belong to the export porcelain of the years around 1740, early in the Qianlong reign, when the famille rose palette was at its freshest and plates of this class were being shipped to Europe in quantity. The peony, the flower of wealth and honor, and the prunus, the first blossom of the year, are among the most favored flowers of the export painter’s repertoire.

At 8½ inches, the plate suits a wall arrangement, hung singly or grouped with other eighteenth-century export porcelain or English delftware, or it can be set on a stand on a mantel, bookshelf or cabinet shelf, where the pink, turquoise and sepia of the rim reward a closer look.

Dimensions
Diameter: 8½ inches (21.6 cm)
Height: 1 inch (2.5 cm)

Marks
Unmarked.

Provenance
Earle D. Vandekar of Knightsbridge

Condition
Good.

References
David S. Howard and John Ayers, China for the West (Sotheby Parke Bernet, 1978).
Arlene M. Palmer, A Winterthur Guide to Chinese Export Porcelain (Crown, 1976).
Patricia Bjaaland Welch, Chinese Art: A Guide to Motifs and Visual Imagery (Tuttle, 2008), for the peony and prunus.

Historical Context
Famille rose is the Western trade name for the pink-toned overglaze palette introduced at Jingdezhen in the 1720s, known in Chinese as fencai. Its opaque enamels, and above all the ruby pink derived from colloidal gold, allowed the painter to shade a petal from white through rose to crimson in a way the earlier famille verte could not, and by the 1730s it had become the dominant palette of the export trade. Plates of this type, with a flowering plant at the center and a diaper border reserved with panels, were made in enormous numbers for the European market through the middle decades of the eighteenth century and were ordered through the East India companies by the dozen.

(Ref: NY11255B-inm) See less