A Very Large Chinese Kraak Porcelain ‘Spinning’ Bowl, Ming Dynasty, Chongzhen Period.

A Very Large Chinese Kraak Porcelain Bowl, Ming Dynasty, Chongzhen Period, 1628-1644. Almost certainly made for the Netherlands. The painting is well done and very lively. The cobalt oxide has fired to a strong blue which is bright in strong light, but slightly grey in lower light. The photographs were taken using a strong clear light, in some cases the blue appears too vibrant. The interior of this deep bowl is typical of late Kraak ware with its panels of landscapes with figures and rather European looking buildings. The well of the bowl is decorated with a lady spooling silk, sometimes referred to as the ‘spinning’ design or ‘spinning Lady’. The woman spinning is clearly Chinese, however the technique she is employing would have been very familiar to the Dutch and other Europeans. The European houses are often found on these of large late Ming Kraak porcelain bowls, the houses look slightly incongruous set among Chinese landscapes with Chinese scholar’s and their attendants. The panels of flowing flowers are influenced by Iranian art, the larger flower panels to the interior are unusual. The panels include tulips, which would have also been very popular in the Netherlands. Tulpenmanie (Tulip Mania) gripped the Netherlands from around 1634 to 1637, that coincided with the production of this bowl which was made in the China during the Chongzhen period 1628-1644, at the end of the Ming dynasty. Perhaps this bowl was purchased with the vast profits made by a speculative tulip grower. The bulbs were worth a small fortune but ended up as worthless. So maybe this bowl had to be sold to help pay the growers debtors. I think my imagination is running away with me!

Back to reality. There is a particularly interesting section in the excellent catalogue from Jorge Welsh, Kraak Porcelain, The rise of global trade in the late 16th and early 17th century (see References). I think it is worth quoting in full. “The fact that no bowls of this type have been recovered from any of the 17th century shipwrecks so far discovered, makes a precise dating difficult (when referring to a very similar bowl in the book). Reference to porcelain decorated with the so-called ‘Dutch flowers’, however, is found on a V.O.C. document of the Hoge Regening (the government in Batavia) informing Tayouan on 3 July 1635 that Dutch paintings, flower or leafwork were not wanted because the Dutch paintings on porcelain were not considered strange or rare. At the time it was not possible to carry out an order immediately, thus this order had to be repeated again in 1637 and 1638.”

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