A Extremely Rare Ming Style Puce Decorated Yongzheng ‘Sanduo’ Bowl.

Condition

There is one long fine crack, see the Photograph Gallery for details.

Size

12.8 cm ( 5 inches).

Provenance

Robert McPherson Antiques. The John Drew Collection. Mary and Peter White Collection. The John Drew Collection : John Drew was born in 1933 in Tideswell, Derbyshire, where his father was curate. The family moved to Norfolk whilst he was still a baby and his father became the rector of the parish of Intwood and Keswick. He was educated at Sedbergh School and after National Service in the R.A.F. being taught Russian, he went to Queens College, Oxford to read Greats (Classics). He spent nearly all his working life in various African countries as an archivist, moving to a post at Cape Town University in 1978. He remained in Cape Town after his retirement until his death in 2006. He had a great love of the English countryside (but not the climate) and this is shown in many of the pieces he collected. His taste was varied and ranged from Neolithic right through to the 18th Century. When we sent photograph to his home in Cape Town of pieces we thought he might be interested in, he would write long funny well observed letters back, wanting to add many of the items to his growing collection. Over the years we got to know him better and better, and during the last few years it was very rare for him to not want all the pieces we offered him. We knew his taste, even though his taste was so varied. This was in no small part because he had a very good eye and it was a pleasure finding things that interested him, because they were also very interesting to us. He never got to put his collection on display, something he hoped to do while on retirement in England, so it is with a mixture of pleasure and sadness that we offer these pieces from his collection this June. Each piece has a John Drew collection label, so when the collection is split up there will be some lasting record of the love and hard work he put into his two decades of collecting.

Stock number

25934

References

The minimalistic design of the red fruits is indebted to the early Ming dynasty creation. Xuande prototypes were excavated from the waste heaps of the Ming imperial kilns in Zhushan, Jingdezhen; see a fragmentary Xuande-marked stemcup, included in Imperial Porcelain: Recent Discoveries of Jingdezhen Ware, Museum of Oriental Ceramics, Osaka, 1995, cat. no. 43, together with an unmarked example, cat. no. 44. See a pair of Yongzheng bowls from the Meiyintang collection, published in Regina Krahl, Chinese Ceramics from the Meiyintang Collection, London, 1994-2010, vol. 2, no. 736. Several examples have appeared at auctions, including one sold at Christie's New York, 15th September 2011, lot 1571, and again in these rooms, 30th November - 1st December 2017, lot 612.