Thank you for registering for our auction! You are required to provide: 1. Deposit; 保证金待商议； 2. Copy or images of ID card (front and back) or Passport 3. Images of Credit card (front and back).
of square section, the gently bilobed sides of the vessel rising to a short recessed waist and upright galleried rim with indented corners, all supported on four cabriole legs in the shape of four-clawed feet issuing from monster-masks, the lobes carved with a slightly recessed taotie mask centered on the vessel’s corners and patterned with granulation, the neck incised with classic scroll, the outer face of the rim incised with the characters xiang hua gong yang (presenting incense and % owers) amid cloud scrolls, the white body covered in a clear glaze pooling to an ivory tint in the recesses, the underside of the body incised with the characters Zhiyuan er shi er nian san yue ri zao (made in the third month of the twenty-second year of Zhiyuan)
Height 4? in., 11.4 cm
PROVENANCE
English Private Collection
Sotheby’s London, 10th June 1997, lot 15.
Collection of Bernadette and William M. B. Berger, Denver,
Colorado, acquired in 1997.
元 定窰白釉饕餮紋四足爐
《至元二十二年三月日造》款
敬語： 香花供養
來源
英國私人收藏 倫敦蘇富比1997年6月10日，編號15
Bernadette 及 William M. B. Berger 伉儷收藏，丹佛， 科羅拉多州，購於1997年
No other Dingyao incense burner of related form or design appears to have been published. Any dated Ding wares are extremely rare, as are Ding wares dateable to the Yuan dynasty in general. To judge from the inscription xiang hua gong yang, a phrase borrowed from the Diamond Sutra, the piece was probably commissioned together with a pair of % ower vases to be donated to a Buddhist temple to commemorate a special occasion. Tong Yihua lists another white incense burner with animalmask design in the Zhongguo lidai taoci kuanshi huiji, Hong Kong, 1984, p. 54, with the same inscription but dated to the thirty-second year of Khubilai Khan’s zhiyuan reign period (equivalent to 1295), which in fact was the fi rst year of his grandson’s reign, a year after his death, as well as a white % ower vase dated equivalent to 1282. Another Ding piece dated to the Yuan dynasty is a very large vase with fi xed ring handles from the Eumorfopoulos collection, now in the British Museum, illustrated in Hobson, The George Eumorfopoulos Collection Catalogue of Chinese, Corean and Persian Pottery and Porcelain, vol. 3, 1926, pl. XXVII, no. C132, which is dated by an ink inscription in accordance with 1350. In the Yuan dynasty, ceramic altar vessels of bronze form were made by various kilns, particularly those at Longquan and Jingdezhen, yet it is rare to fi nd a Ding piece so closely imitating a contemporary metal incense burner. This censer shares its square quatrefoil lobed form with a bronze censer of the same period, perhaps also with related archaistic decoration (degraded), recovered from a ship wrecked ofi the coast of Korea around 1323, and included in the Special Exhibition of Cultural Relics Found ofi the Sinan Coast, National Museum of Korea, Seoul, 1977, cat. no. 270. The dating of this lot is consistent with the result of a thermoluminescence test, Oxford sample no. B66j10.
