Southern Song or Yuan Carved Qingbai Bowl

A Southern Song or Yuan dynasty Qingbai porcelain bowl, c.1200-1320. This thickly potted carved Qingbai bowl comes from The Peter Arlidge Collection of Song Ceramics. It has a roundel to the well, the design is of a goose, or perhaps a swan, swimming with reeds curving up over it. The design has been rapidly carved and the water has been rendered using a comb-tool, the back is more deeply carved with two bands of loosely drawn petals. The rim is dressed on the biscuit-porcelain using an iron oxide wash. The unglazed base is thick with a shallow broad footrim. The earliest known qingbai wares were produced in Jingdezhen in Jiangxi province around the late 10th century and are characterized by faint pale-blue glazes on low, wide forms. Qingbai continued to be enormously popular and highly produced throughout the Song dynasty (960-1279) and was prevalent in the Yuan dynasty (1279-1368), but slackened during the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) until being replaced by tianbai, ‘sweet white’ ware. The initial forms of qingbai were simple bowls and dishes but by the mid-Northern Song the forms had advanced to include a wide variety of objects used for daily life such as ewers, boxes, incense burners, granary models, vases, jars, sculptures, cups, cupstands, water droppers, lamps, grave wares, and tools for writing and painting. The precedent for the majority of these forms is found in earlier metalwork and lacquer and Rawson has suggested that the imitation of silver was the primary force behind the production of white wares, including qingbai.

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