Michael Hughes
Vice President and Head of Department
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PROPERTY FROM THE MEE-DIN AND ROBERT W. MOORE COLLECTION OF CHINESE LACQUER
Lot 130
A Magnificent mother-of-pearl-inlaid black lacquer (bao Luodian) octagonal oblong tray Ming Dynasty, 15th-16th Century
15 March 2021, 10:00 EDT
New YorkSold for US$17,500 inc. premium
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Bruce Maclaren
Global Head, Chinese Paintings and Calligraphy
A Magnificent mother-of-pearl-inlaid black lacquer (bao Luodian) octagonal oblong tray
Ming Dynasty, 15th-16th Century
The center of the tray decorated in the Yuan style with a pavilion terrace scene with two gentlemen seated at a table whilst being served wine by an attendant and listening to female musicians alongside, all under the eaves of a pavilion on a fenced terrace surrounded by a lotus pond with a pair of mandarin ducks, rockwork, willow, bamboo and encroaching mist, the well decorated with a composite floral scroll of thirty-four flower-heads which is echoed on the exterior above small lappets.
22 1/2 x 14in (57 x 35.5cm)
The center of the tray decorated in the Yuan style with a pavilion terrace scene with two gentlemen seated at a table whilst being served wine by an attendant and listening to female musicians alongside, all under the eaves of a pavilion on a fenced terrace surrounded by a lotus pond with a pair of mandarin ducks, rockwork, willow, bamboo and encroaching mist, the well decorated with a composite floral scroll of thirty-four flower-heads which is echoed on the exterior above small lappets.
22 1/2 x 14in (57 x 35.5cm)
Footnotes
明 十五至十六世紀 黑漆嵌螺鈿人物樓閣圖八角盤
For another octagonal dish dated to the second half of the 15th Century but also displaying certain Yuan characteristics such as the scrolling floral border with individual flower-heads and with the central scene of a gathering in a courtly setting, and very similar handling of drifting mist-clouds and striated rockwork, see James C. Y. Watt and Barbara Brennan Ford, East Asian Lacquer, The Florence and Herbert Irving Collection, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1991, pp.131-132, no. 58. See also ibid., pp.124-125, no. 54 and pp. 135-136, no. 60, the first, a Yuan dynasty nine-sided dish with similar border treatment, the second, a dish dated to the sixteenth century with elegant ladies with similarly-treated coiffered hair and facial features.
See Karamano, Imported Lacquerwork-Chinese, Korean and Ryukyuan (Okinawa), Selections From The Tokugawa Art Museum, No. 2,Nagoya, 1997, pp. 69-74, no's 125-135, for a group of Ming lacquer wares with similar courtly pavilions and figural scenes dated to the 15/16th Centuries. However an earlier tray with an almost identical border decoration bearing an added Huang-Qing (Ming era) painted mark but dated to the Yuan Dynasty does bear very close comparison. Indeed based on the border-decoration alone, both exterior and interior, a Yuan date for our tray would not be out of the question. However, the central design of our tray, and in particular the treatment of inlay and incised details, (rather more detailed and precise than the loosely-incised markings on the Yuan antecedent) found on the figures themselves, the clothing, architectural details and areas of rockwork, suggests a Ming dating, whilst still clearly in an overall Yuan style.
For other Yuan and early Ming dynasty dishes with similar courtly pavilion scenes and scrolling multi-flowerhead borders, see the Catalogue, Special Exhibition, Oriental Lacquer Arts, Tokyo National Museum, Tokyo, 1977, no. 492, for a circular dish (13 1/2 inches diam.) dated Yuan/early Ming Dynasty, from the Hakutsuru Art Museum, Hyogo; and also The Colors and Forms of Song and Yuan China, Featuring Lacquerwares, Ceramics and Metalwares, Nezu Institute of Fine Arts, Tokyo, 2004, no's 124-125, the latter box also octagonal in shape, a popular one during the Yuan dynasty. Another example, nine-sided, is illustrated by Denise Patry Leidy, Mother-of-Pearl, A Tradition in Asian Lacquer, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2006, pp.26-31, figs 22-24.
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