283.
A ‘EN GRISAILLE’, POLYCHROME AND GILT LOBED BOUGH POT
Qing dynasty, late Qianlong period, 1795 circa
…. cm high
Provenance: Naples, Villa della Floridiana, Museo Duca di Martina, Placido de Sangro (1829-1891) collection.
inv. n. …..
The central medallion of this bought pot – with an urn and a willow tree – is directly inspired by a print entitled L’Urne mystérieuse and published in France in 1793. The print, and the decoration on this piece, show the profiles of King Louis XVI, Queen Marie Antoinette, their son the Dauphine and their daughter Madame Royale: the composition could be therefore considered a memorial of the executed royal family (D. Howard – J. Ayers, China for the West. Chinese Porcelain and other Decorative Arts for Export illustrated from the Mottahedeh Collection, 2 voll., London – New York 1978, I, n. 242: the authors list a series of alternative borders for the same medallion).
This kind of pot, usually in a pair, were very fashionable in Europe and United States of America in the eighteenth century, where there was a spread for the hobby of gardening, as stated by Thomas Fairchild in his The City Gardner (London 1722) who wrote “One may guess the general love my fellow citizens have of gardening, in furnishing their rooms and chambers with basons of flowers and Bough pots, rather than not have something of a garden before them.” (A.E. Lange, Chinese Export Art at Historic Deerfield, Deerfield 2005, pp. 141-142, n. 47, commented two bough pots with a shape very similar to this).
According to Christiaan Jörg (C.J.A. Jörg, in collaboration with J. Van Campen, Chinese Ceramics in the Collection of the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. The Ming and Qing Dynasties, London 1997, p. 272), this kind of bough pot is more common in American collections than European, testifying the increasing market of Chinese porcelain in the United States.
