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

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Past Exhibition

SONG DYNASTY CERAMICS:
The Ronald W. Longsdorf Collection

March 15 - April 13, 2013

42.
A JIANYAO ‘STARBURST’ BLACK- AND BROWN-GLAZED TEA BOWL

Song Dynasty (A.D. 960-1279)

with steep flaring sides rising to a wide mouth with tapered rim and with a gently inset ‘finger groove’ below the lip on the exterior, the sturdy walls decorated inside and out with dramatic brushed-on streaks of russet-brown over a lustrous black glaze, creating the appearance of a starburst rising from the circular floor of the bowl, the black glaze on the exterior also with bold rust-colored streaks and ending in a thick roll around the knife-pared angle low on the sides, the lower sides and foot unglazed showing the coarse dark reddish-purplish-brown body, matching the color around the rim where the glaze has drained away.

Diameter 4 78 inches (12.3 cm)

A Jianyao tea bowl decorated with this rare dramatic glaze technique, excavated in 1990 at the Jian kiln site and now in the collection of the Fujian Provincial Museum, is illustrated in Zhongguo taoci quanji (8) Song, xia (The Complete Works of Chinese Ceramics, Vol. 8, Song, II), Shanghai, 1999, p. 221, no. 204, with a detailed caption on p. 304. The same tea bowl was exhibited at the MOA Museum of Art and illustrated in the catalogue of the special exhibition of temmoku tea bowls entitled Karamono temmoku: Fukken-shō ken’yō shutsudo temmoku to Nihon densei no temmoku, tokubetsuten, (Temmoku Tea Wares: Temmoku Excavated from the Jian Kilns in Fujian Province and Temmoku in Japanese Private Collections, A Special Exhibition), Atami, 1994, p. 66, no. 49 (two views) and with an interior view on p. 41.

宋    建窯黑釉鐵銹斑盞    徑  12.3  厘米