A rare square polychrome painted 'Dragon' bowl, mark and period of Jiajing (1522-1566)

Lot 65. A rare square polychrome painted 'Dragon' bowl, mark and period of Jiajing (1522-1566); width 13.4 cm., 5 1/4 in. Est. 600,000 — 800,000 HKD. Lot Sold 1,940,000 HKD. photo Sotheby's 2011

of square section, with curved, widely flaring sides and a straight foot, painted in an unusual combination of yellow, aubergine, red and black enamels with touches of green with four striding five-clawed dragons among scrolls of lingzhi around the outer sides with a ruyi border below, the inside with a similar dragon in a square panel in the centre and a lingzhi-scroll border at the rim, all enclosed between underglaze-blue double-line borders, the base with an unbordered six-character reign mark.

Provenance: Collection of Harry J. Oppenheim (died 1946).
Collection of Nancy and Ira Koger.
Ralph M. Chait Galleries, New York..

Exhibited: Mostra d'Arte Cinese/Exhibition of Chinese Art, Palazzo Ducale, Venice, 1954, cat. no. 711 (illustrated).

Literature: R.L. Hobson, Bernard Rackham and William King, Chinese Ceramics in Private Collections, London, 1931, fig. 134.
John Ayers, Chinese Ceramics. The Koger Collection, London, 1985, pl. 84.
Regina Krahl, Chinese Ceramics from the Meiyintang Collection, London, 1994-2010, vol. 4, no. 1688.

Note: For another piece of this design and this unusual colour scheme in the Shanghai Museum see Lu Minghua, Mingdai guanyao ciqi [Ming imperial porcelain], Shanghai, 2007, pl. 4-16; and for one in the British Museum, London, from the Eumorfopoulos collection see Jessica Harrison-Hall, Ming Ceramics in the British Museum, London, 2001, no. 9:114.

Square porcelain bowl with underglaze blue and overglaze aubergine, green, yellow and black enamels, Ming dynasty, Jiajing mark and period (1522-1566). Porcelain, 13 x 13 x 7,2 cm. Ex-Eumorfopoulos collection. 1937,0716.87 © 2017 Trustees of the British Museum 

Harry (Henry) James Oppenheim assembled an outstanding collection of Chinese ceramics and other works of art in the early part of the 20th century. His collection was characterized by R.L. Hobson in 1931 with the words "Limited exhibition space may be a drawback to the omnivorous collector, but it has compensating advantages. It forces its victims to be selective ... The collection of Mr. H. J. Oppenheim's flat is ... like a well-tended garden drastically weeded and full of fine flowers." Oppenheim left his entire collection to the British Museum, London, but excluded the present bowl from his donation, probably because the British Museum already owned an example of the same design from the Eumorfopoulos collection.

Sotheby's. The Meiyintang Collection - An Important Selection of Imperial Chinese Porcelains. 07 April 2011. Hong Kong