With a central decoration of two figures with a lady inking the back of a kneeling gentleman, with a boy attendant to one side and the reverse painted with a large ewer and flowers in vases on pedestals and with two figures holding swords. The vase depicts the story of the Song military general Yue Fei, with his mother tattooing his back with four characters of ‘Jing Zhang Bao Guo”. Qianlong seal mark in iron red to the base. Height 46 cm
Purchased at Sarl Wemaere - de Beaupuis Encheres, Rouen, France, November 2010, Lot 306. The Avalon
Collection. This collection, which in the main focuses on the Interregnum and Kangxi periods has been both carefully and sensitively formed over the last twenty-five years. The collector, a member of the English Oriental Ceramic Society, has assembled the collection with an eye for provenance whilst purchasing from old European collections, well-established antique dealers and at auction. Academically, the pieces have been well researched both in terms of their symbolism and narrative themes. In many instances the imagery on the pieces has been referenced to episodes in the romantic and historic novels of Chinese mythology, which were used extensively in the decoration of seventeenth century Chinese porcelain.