J.J. Lally & Co., Oriental Art / New York City, New York

A very similar jar from the Jaehne Collection, now in the Newark Museum, is illustrated by Medley in Tang Pottery and Porcelain, London, 1981, col. pl. L, opposite p. 96, and the same jar is illustrated by Mowry in Hare’s Fur, Tortoiseshell and Partridge Feathers: Chinese Brown-and Black-Glazed Ceramics, 400–1400, Cambridge, 1996, no. 8, p. 95, with a lengthy discussion on pp. 94–97, where the author points out that this special type of glazed stoneware was already famous in the 9th century and the author Nan Zhou made special mention of the excellent quality of the blue-splashed brown-glazed stoneware drum cores produced in Lushan in his Jiegulu – a treatise on drums written between 848 and 850. Mowry also mentions a similar jar in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Compare also blue-splashed Lushan jars of this type in the Idemitsu Museum, Tokyo, illustrated in Chinese Ceramics in the Idemitsu Collection, Tokyo, 1987, no. 389; and in the Matsuoka Museum of Art, Tokyo, illustrated in Exhibition of Famous Masterpieces of Chinese Pottery and Porcelain, Tokyo, 1983, no. 14. Another jar of this type with a single row of splashes is in the Shanghai Museum, exhibited in 1995 at the Rohss Museum of Arts, Goteborg, Sweden, in an exhibition entitled Den Bla Draken: En utstallning av kinesiskt konsthantverk fran Shanghai Museum (The Blue Dragon: Ancient Chinese Art from the Shanghai Museum), Göteborg, 1995, p. 35, no. 12, described as from “Jia xian (county), Lushan xian or Yu xian, Henan province”.