|
A PORCELAIN BRUSHWASHER & SEAL PASTE BOX. A brushwasher and lidded seal paste box of the late Ching Dynasty (19th Century), the finely detailed relief decoration in white porcelain cleverly mimicking classical Chinese landscape painting, the contrasting “snake-skin green” ground quite true to that color as it first appeared on 18th Century imperial porcelain wares.* The two-piece round ‘box’ depicts a single, continuous landscape in a circular composition with simultaneous bird’s eye view and multiple perspectives, the rocks and trees in the foreground beyond which two tiny figures have departed from a thatched roof pavilion and now face distant mountains. The one-piece, open mouth brushwasher reiterates the scene only from a different perspective, a necessarily compressed and narrower “hand scroll” view with a horizontal orientation, the decoration surrounding the outer walls of the brush washer. The technical quality of the relief decoration is superb and varied in height, quite successfully imparting a sense of depth: the pavilion in lower relief than the trees in the foreground, while the finer tree branches are in shallower relief from the closer and more prominent tree trunks, the remaining leaves on the trees and the tiny grasses suggesting the ground are raised dots in the green colored ground. The distant mountains are rendered in much lower relief than the small hills in the foreground although their “brushstrokes” are clearly visible. Ubiquitous “mi-dots” re-emphasize the painterly inspiration of these little landscapes rendered in porcelain. Unmarked and unsigned and without spurious reign marks. Both the brush washer and box are raised on a circular footrim. Excellent condition with some yellowing and ink-stains to the brushwasher. The interior of the brushwasher is green, while the inside of the seal paste box has been left white, possibly in consideration of the red cinnabar seal paste that it was intended to hold. Dimensions: brushwasher 11.2cm (4-1/2”) diameter, 3.3cm (1-1.4”) high; seal paste box 10cm (4”) diameter, 5cm (1-1/2”) high. *See p. 69 (plate 96) of “Chinese Porcelain” by Anthony du Boulay (1973 ISBN 0 7064 0045 3) for a monochrome Yongzheng dish whose color matches the peculiar green ground color of the item offered here. Translated as “snake-skin green,” this color seems to have been introduced to porcelain production in the early 18th Century: “… many of these new colours were produced under the directorship of Ts’ang Ying-hsuan, who was in charge of the Imperial factory between 1683 and 1726 … The T’ao hu mentioned the invention of four colours, the eel-skin yellow, the spotted yellow (possibly the egg and spinach design already described), the snake-skin green [figure 96] …” [pp.68-69]
|
