Of circular form, the deep rounded sides rising from a short straight foot ring to an everted rim, decorated in shades of underglaze blue, finely painted with scholars in a bamboo grove amid resplendent bamboo, one sage in the company of another conversing, nearby a third sage playing the qin and four more listening while considering a group of antiques arranged before them, accompanied by an attendant preparing food beside a stove, the rim with a band of hawthorn and ’cracked ice’ pattern, the well painted with a further figure of an old man reclining beneath the bough of a pine tree, the inner rim painted with a pattern of pine, bamboo and prunus, the ‘three friends of winter’, the glazed base with the six-character mark of Kangxi within a double circle, and of the period. Period: Kangxi (1662-1722). Diameter 20 cm.