Offered by Franck Baptiste Paris
REQUEST INFORMATION
Extremely rare potpourri in Chinese famille verte porcelain and gilt bronze mount.
Porcelain with a white background decorated with green, blue, yellow and red polychrome enamels.
Very beautiful rotating decor of bucolic scenes, games around a table, a tea ceremony or even children playing by a stream.
The collar decorated with a frieze of “ruyi” heads.
The finely chiseled and mercury-gilded bronze frame frames the pot with a rim in the upper part and in the lower part, both are connected by side handles decorated with women's heads topped with palmettes, fleur-de-lis and twisted handles .
Very good state of conservation, a small lack of enamel on the neck.
Porcelain, China, Jiangxi Province, Jingdhezen kilns, reign of Kangxi (1622-1722).
The bronze frame, work of a Parisian haberdasher, Regency period around 1720.
Dimensions:
Height: 30 cm; Diameter: 26 cm
The piece we are presenting was originally a ginger pot from the imperial kilns of Jingdhezen and probably intended for the Chinese domestic market.
Imported from Asia to satisfy the appetite of an elite wishing to possess this material unknown in Europe, it was purchased by a Parisian haberdasher who decided to divert its use as a food container to transform it into an art object.
To do this, he decided to cut the neck and drill holes all around the base using a now lost technique, before adding a sumptuous bronze frame, with side handles and an openwork cover.
If many pot pourri were mounted in this way, our example is very rare because it has enamels with subtle polychrome gradients and a very abundant decoration with no less than ten characters, which is unusual on a ginger pot .
In addition to the characters, the scenes represented are very original, such as the tea ceremony, or children's games diving and fishing baskets in the river, which is unique to our knowledge.
The representation of baluster vases and a Byzantine-type ewer are not common; these shapes are characteristic of Ming productions intended for the Ottoman Empire, which allows us to place our piece quite early in the reign of Kangxi.
The extreme quality of the carving and gilding of our mount as well as the presence of a fleur-de-lys allow us to consider a royal provenance.
Indeed, this small corpus of oriental porcelain which combines high quality decoration and mounting with royal emblems constitutes the quintessence of objects mounted at the end of the reign of Louis XIV and during the Regency.
It therefore seems very likely to us that these pieces were intended for the royal family, in the broader sense of the term, that is to say for the legitimate and legitimized descendants of Louis XIV.
