Image: Sotheby’s
The catalogue note, citing the research of Liao Pao Show, links its introduction at the imperial kilns in Jingdezhen to efforts from 1741 onwards by Tang Ying, the long-time kiln supervisor, to please the Qianlong emperor who had criticised earlier porcelain. The lot page records the vase as belonging to the collection of Dame Agnes Lowndes Jekyll, who lived from 1861 to 1937, and passed to her by descent.
Julian King, International Specialist in Chinese Works of Art at Sotheby’s, said that the vast majority of the thousands of submissions the auction house receives in this category turn out to be fake, which makes a genuine piece exceptionally rare. King recognised it on sight, “This vase is pure gold,” he said. The auction house catalogued it as lot sixty-one in its Chinese Art sale, listing it as property from an English family collection, according to the Sotheby’s lot page. Few objects can claim to be unique, yet the Sotheby’s catalogue note says no other vase of this extraordinary design appears to survive. The provenance, meaning the documented ownership history of an object, proved decisive, according to Sotheby’s.
Every day, Sotheby’s receives unexpected objects through its online submissions portal, where owners upload a few photographs of something they suspect might be valuable. In Chinese art, that flood is overwhelming. This vase was different. The Sotheby’s lot page explains that sgraffiato, also spelt sgraffito, means carving through a surface layer to reveal a contrasting layer below. Here, the carving cuts through ruby enamel down to the glazed porcelain, revealing the design in white. it returned to the fore in the eighteenth century alongside the yangcai palette, whose name means foreign colours Although the method came to prominence in China as early as the Song dynasty. In other words, this painstaking technique was refined partly to satisfy a demanding ruler. The note describes the form as the classical yuhuchunping shape, popular since the Song dynasty, combined with brilliant ruby enamelling, baroque-inspired scrollwork and intricate sgraffiato. The vase stands thirty-seven centimetres tall, and its base carries a six-character seal mark in underglaze blue. Most related vases appear to have been made in pairs for the Qianlong court, and the note points to comparable examples in the Palace Museum in Beijing, the Yale University Art Gallery and the Hakone Museum of Art in Japan. That context helps explain why Sotheby’s describes the piece as a rare and exuberant example of Qianlong taste. Authenticity was only part of the story. Sotheby’s describes her as a Scottish-born British artist, writer and philanthropist from a prominent collecting family; her father, William Graham, was a patron of Pre-Raphaelite artists. The vase was illustrated in an estate agent’s brochure for the Cornish house where it had long sat. A piece of imperial porcelain had, in effect, been pictured to help sell a property, a reminder that remarkable objects can sit quietly in everyday domestic settings for many years.
