Michael Hughes
Vice President and Head of Department
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PROPERTY FROM THE COLLECTION OF ERIC WESENBERG, CALIFORNIA
Lot 4
An Archaistic bronze sloping rectangular vessel and cover, Fu Song/Ming Dynasty
15 March 2021, 10:00 EDT
New YorkSold for US$17,812.50 inc. premium
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Bruce Maclaren
Global Head, Chinese Paintings and Calligraphy
An Archaistic bronze sloping rectangular vessel and cover, Fu
Song/Ming Dynasty
Of rectangular shape, the vessel and cover are flat-cast in impercetable shallow relief with a dense ground of stylized bird motifs and coiled cells, the spreading corner supports similarly cast and with a cut-out section in the apron, thickly-cast on both sections of the fu with a pair of mythical animal-head handles, the cover alone, cast with four evenly-spaced small animal-mask tabs around the rim, under a polished dark patina.
13 1/2in (34.3 cm) across the handles
Of rectangular shape, the vessel and cover are flat-cast in impercetable shallow relief with a dense ground of stylized bird motifs and coiled cells, the spreading corner supports similarly cast and with a cut-out section in the apron, thickly-cast on both sections of the fu with a pair of mythical animal-head handles, the cover alone, cast with four evenly-spaced small animal-mask tabs around the rim, under a polished dark patina.
13 1/2in (34.3 cm) across the handles
Footnotes
宋/明 銅簠
PROVENANCE
Nicholas S. Pitcher, London, 2008
來源
Nicholas S. Pitcher, 倫敦, 2008年
For a near identical example, perhaps the same bronze, see Sotheby's, London, 9 November 2005, lot 491. See also another very similar archaic-bronze exemplar, sold at Christie's, New York, The Sze Yuan Tang Archaic Bronzes from the Anthony Hardy Collection, 15 September 2010, lot 871.
For two other pre-cursors of the 'Spring and Autumn' period, (circa 770 – 476 BCE.), see Christian Deydier, Understanding Ancient Chinese Bronzes, Their Importance in Chinese Culture, Their Shapes, Functions and Motifs, Paris, 2015, pp. 36-37, from the Meiyintang Collection, and the same author, Chinese Bronzes, Fribourg, Switzerland, 1980, p. 227, no. 78 from the Art Institute of Chicago.
The term fu 簠 was employed very early on in classical texts to refer to a vessel used to hold offerings of millet during rituals. This oblong vessel of rectangular form with upwardly sloping sides in its lower section, is supported by a flared foot and topped by a cover of the same shape, which may also serve as a mirror-vessel when up-turned. The fu 簠 appears during the end of the Western Zhou 西周 period, or, more precisely, at the end of the 9th century B.C. and becomes very popular during the subsequent Spring and Autumn 春秋 period.
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