A twelve-panel Coromandel 'birthday' screen

Qing dynasty, 17th / 18th century

清十七 / 十八世紀 髹漆加彩群仙祝壽圖十二扇屏風

each side richly carved and infilled with polychrome lacquers against a black ground, the principal side dominated by a magnificent scene of a Daoist immortals, officials, and supplicants traversing a celestial landscape to pay tribute to Shoulao seated in a pavilion at the center of the composition, the steps of the pavilion opening onto a balustraded garden filled with devotees approaching and bearing gifts of peaches, amidst them a pair of musicians playing the flute and castanets, an attendant stoking a censer, and a pair of cranes strutting, the grounds lined with groupings of rocks, bamboo, and gnarled trees, to either side of the compound additional immortals arriving across a turbulent sea or aloft swirling clouds, including Xiwangmu approaching on a canopied chariot, Li Tieguai astride a crane and brandishing an iron crutch with a double-gourd fastened to it, Lan Caihe floating on a cloud with a flower basket in hand and accompanied by a deer carrying large peaches, and Liu Hai riding a toad alongside Qin Gao on a carp, among other figures from the Daoist pantheon, all framed by a border of stylized dragons set between 'landscape' panels above and 'mythical beast' panels below and surrounded by a floral border at the perimeter, the reverse with the 'Hundred Birds' in a resplendent garden filled with flowers of each season in bloom, in the center a pair of massive phoenix fanning out their rich plumage with magpies, cranes, pheasants, songbirds, and other species perching or flying nearby, bound by a floral border and surrounded by further 'bird and flower' panels above and below all within a further floral border, the legs beneath each panel carved with an integral trefoil-shaped apron

Each panel: Height 109 in., 277 cm; Width 19 ? in., 49 cm