J.J. Lally & Co., Oriental Art / New York City, New York
MenuPast Exhibition
Early Chinese Ceramics: An American Private Collection
March 28 - April 16, 2005
13.
A LARGE BLUE-SPLASHED BROWN-GLAZED STONEWARE JAR
Tang Dynasty, A.D. 8th – 9th Century
of Lushan type, from the Duandian kiln, the tall ovoid body tapering down to a solid foot with splayed and chamfered edge, the wide mouth surrounded by four double-stranded loop handles applied high on the shoulders, covered inside and out with a lustrous dark brown glaze and boldly decorated on the exterior with twelve large milky-blue “phosphatic” splashes vigorously brushed onto the surface in two uneven rows, the base and the mouthrim left unglazed revealing the oatmeal-colored stoneware.
Height 16 inches (40.6 cm)
Exhibited on loan at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, 2001.
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”.
唐 褐釉藍斑繫罐 高 40.6 厘米
