Footnotes

• Jianyao tea bowls of this radiant type have a wall that thickens as it descends resulting in a relatively heavy bowl due to its low centre of gravity. Interestingly, bowls of this form correlate in coloration to the famous 'oil spot glazes, but differ in the form of their irridescent markings. The first step in the production process involved turning the bowl on the potter's wheel, after which its foot and base were formed with a knife. Next, the bowl was dipped in the glaze slurry following a period of frying. Once it had dried again, its lip was immersed in an iron-bearing slip, which caused the hare's fur streaks to form in the kiln. Depending on the amount of slip applied to the surface of the glaze, the hare's fur patterns on Jian bowls can range from subtle to emphatic.
  
  A similar Jianyao tea bowl of this classic form with comparable silvery hear's fur markings, from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, is illustrated in Mowry, Hare's Fur, Tortoiseshell and Partridge Feathers. Chinese Brown and Black-Glazed Ceramics,400-1400, Cambridge, 1996, pp.219-220, no.83. The illustrated bowl was attributed by the author to the kilns at Shuiji, Jianyang county, Fujian province. See also another Jianyao black-glazed 'hare's fur' tea bowl from the Mrs. Samuel T. Peters collection, illustrated in J.J. Lally & Co., Early Chinese Ceramics. An American Private Collection, New York, Spring 2005, no.23. Compare also a similar example sold at Sotheby's London, 11 May 2011, lot 7.
  
  宋 建陽窯「天目」兔亳茶盌

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Category: Asian Art / Chinese Works of Art

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