Northern Song Dynasty (A.D. 960–1127)
the almost spherical body surmounted by a short straight neck rising to a wide mouth with galleried lip enclosing a pair of upright squared lug handles, and moulded with a frieze of interlocking stylized leaf scroll around the widest part of the concave sides between narrow raised lines, the shoulder decorated with a collar of spiral motifs and the neck with a band of key fret, the whole raised on three short paw supports each emerging from the jaws of a lion’s head moulded in high relief and applied over a border of overlapping lotus petals encircling the edge of the plain rounded base, the glossy translucent glaze of characteristic olive-green tone, the interior unglazed exposing the hard gray stoneware body.
Width 4 3⁄4 inches (12 cm)
Height 5 inches (12.8 cm)
Ex Collection The Tsui Art Foundation
Exhibited at the Empress Place Museum, Singapore and illustrated in the catalogue entitled Gems of Chinese Art – Selections of Ceramics and Bronzes from the Tsui Art Foundation, Hong Kong, 1992, no. 39.
Compare the Yaozhou censer of very similar form, moulded with different decoration in the horizontal bands, in the collection of the Museum of Oriental Ceramics, Osaka, which was included in the 1997 travelling exhibition and illustrated in the catalogue The Masterpieces of Yaozhou Ware, Osaka, 1997, p. 64, no. 82, together with two other censers of similar form but lacking the upright lug handles, one from the Yao Zhou Ware Museum, illustrated on p. 65, no. 83, and the other from the Tokyo National Museum, illustrated on p. 63, no. 81.
北宋 耀州青瓷三足爐 寬 12 厘米 高 12.8 厘米
Northern Song Dynasty (A.D. 960–1127)
Width 4 3⁄4 inches (12 cm)
Height 5 inches (12.8 cm)