Chinese porcelain famille rose saucer dish, Early Qianlong, circa 1738

Chinese porcelain famille rose saucer dish, painted with the scene ‘Under the Arbour’ with a seated lady and attendants beside a topiary version of a Western architectural garden arch with children at the front and ducks swimming in a pond, framed by foliage, encircled by twelve reserves of butterflies, insects, fruit and flowers on a green-enamel diaper ground with iron-red shells and flowerheads, the underside with an iron-red and purple enamel pendant band.

9 5/8 inches, 24.5 cm diameter.

Early Qianlong, circa 1738.

• From a Swiss private collection.
   
• The design was drawn in 1737 by Cornelis Pronk (1691-1759) and is the name given to this pattern when it was made. The fourth and final documentary design by Pronk, it was sent to Batavia in 1738 and received in Guangzhou the following year. Although no drawing survives, the associations of that 1738 order with this service has been accepted. In 1730, Pronk executed a watercolour of a similar arbour, which he based on the Cholon pavilion in the park that surrounds Bosch en Hove, an estate near Haarlem, the Netherlands.
   
• A plate of this pattern, gift of Mr. Harry T. Peters, Jr., is illustrated by William R. Sargent in Treasures of Chinese Export Ceramics, from the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts, no. 146, pp. 282/3; another is illustrated by David S. Howard in The Choice of the Private Trader, the Private Market in Chinese Export Porcelain Illustrated from the Hodroff Collection, no. 55, pp. 74/5, where the author includes an underglaze blue example, no. 56, p. 75; a smaller pair is illustrated by Maria Antónia Pinto de Matos in The RA Collection of Chinese Ceramics, A Collector’s Vision, Volume Two, no. 295, p. 183.

Price

This object is eligible for a Certificate of BADA Provenance

Condition report

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