Meaningful Fun
Jingdezhen, 1840-1880
Height: 8.8 cm
Mouth/lip: 1.0/1.3 cm
Stopper: colourless glaze on cobalt pigment on white porcelain; decorated in underglaze blue with a formalized shou (‘longevity’) character (made from half a bead).
Provenance:
Judge Walter Bromberger
Doyle’s, New York, 19 March 2012
Colourless glaze on cobalt pigment on white porcelain; with a wide mouth, convex lip, and recessed flat, circular foot surrounded by a protruding flat, circular foot rim; painted in underglaze blue with a continuous walled garden scene surrounding a house in which sixteen young boys are acting out the triumphant return of one of them, astride a model of a horse, from the imperial examination, some with lanterns, others playing musical instruments (a trumpet and drums) and others holding lanterns aloft while one holds a model of a bat on the end of a stick to denote good fortune, another with a brocade ball and one flying a kite, all beneath a band of formalized clouds and a neck-band of formalized lingzhi, the foot and foot rim unglazed, the interior glazed.
