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A LARGE BLUE AND WHITE 'MASTER OF THE ROCKS' DISH Kangxi image 1
A LARGE BLUE AND WHITE 'MASTER OF THE ROCKS' DISH Kangxi image 2
THE PROPERTY OF A GENTLEMAN 紳士藏品
Lot 202

A LARGE BLUE AND WHITE 'MASTER OF THE ROCKS' DISH
Kangxi

15 May 2025, 11:30 BST
London, New Bond Street

Sold for £6,144 inc. premium

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A LARGE BLUE AND WHITE 'MASTER OF THE ROCKS' DISH

Kangxi
Sturdily potted with rounded sides rising to a slightly everted rim from a channelled foot ring, boldly painted in the interior of the dish with a scene of mountains painted with hemp-fibre brush strokes, dotted with pavilions and scallop-shaped clouds, a scholar on horseback followed by a boy attendant carrying a guqin, the lake with a fisherman in a sampan, the base scratched with the name Wei Yi Gong. 34cm (13 1/2in) diam.

Footnotes

清康熙 青花山水圖盤
刻款「魏扆公」

Provenance: a British private collection

來源:英國私人收藏

The present dish is decorated in the 'Master of the Rocks' style, a landscape painting technique that emerged in the mid-17th century during the late Ming dynasty and remained popular into the early Kangxi reign, though rarely seen after 1700. This style, characterised by dynamic rocky landscapes rendered with 'hemp-fibre' brushstrokes and fluid dots for foliage, was applied to porcelains in underglaze cobalt blue, copper red, and occasionally famille verte enamels. Influenced by late Ming landscape painters such as Dong Qichang (1555–1636) and Wang Jianzhang (active 1628–1644), its dramatic forms parallel those in silk and paper paintings. However, its transmission to Jingdezhen porcelain artists was likely indirect, possibly mediated through woodblock prints like those in the Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting (c.1679), which popularised the 'hemp-fibre' technique in decorative arts. See for example the 'hemp-fibre' brush stroke mountain landscape in the 'Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting', circa 1679, illustrated by T.Canepa and K.Butler, Leaping the Dragon Gate: The Sir Michael Butler Collection of Seventeenth-Century Chinese Porcelain, London, 2021, p.404.

Compare with a related blue and white 'Master of the Rocks' landscape dish, Kangxi, which was sold at Christie's Hong Kong, 30 November 2023, lot 3046.

Additional information

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