251.
A ‘FAMILLE ROSE’ RUBY-BACK DISH
Qing dynasty, Yongzheng period
19,7 cm diam
Provenance: Naples, Villa della Floridiana, Museo Duca di Martina, Placido de Sangro (1829-1891) collection.
inv. n. 3980.
The theme of a beautiful lady surrounded by children, vases, precious objects, books and scrolls is rather common on Yongzheng dishes with a ruby back. Great part of these dishes, such as the present, are characterized by the minute fineness of the painting, by a lavishly profusion of decorative details and by the elegance of the personages.
The meiren hua (“beautiful women painting”) genre flourished in China with greater intensity from the late Ming dynasty to the end of the eighteenth century. As pointed out in the catalogue of the exhibition dedicated to this topic held at the Berkeley Art Museum (J.M. White – J. Cahill, Beauty Revealed: Images of Women in Qing Dynasty Chinese Painting, exhibition catalogue, Berkley 2013), Chinese women belonging to the wealthy social classes of the first part of the Qing dynasty reached an unprecedented social and economic power, even if it could be manifested only inside the boundaries of their households. This emancipation consisted also in a certain availability of books and paintings, and there is also a possibility that a part of the meiren hua paintings could have been commissioned by a female clientele.
Considering that the subject of female beauties appears frequently in that period also on other artistic media, such as porcelain, this hypothesis could be probably enlarged also to other objects different from paintings.
In the specific case of this dish, the presence of the two boys could be explained as a wish for happiness, long life and prosperity: they in fact hold in their hands a ruyi sceptre, a pomegranate and a lotus flower, all widespread good omen symbols.
Even at the court of Yongzheng the meiren hua obtained a certain success. Before becoming emperor, between 1709 and 1723 he commissioned as Prince Yong a set of twelve paintings depicting female beauties, probably realized by painters active in the Jiangnan area, south of Yangtzi river, where that genre had reached a great popularity (W. Cheng, Idealized Portraits of Women for the Qing Imperial Court, in “Orientations”, 45, 2014, 4, pp. 86-99, pp. 92-99). Even if it is still unknown if these figures represent real court ladies or idealized female portraits, the beauty of their faces, the luxury of the robes, the elegance of the pose and the refinement of the setting, all these characteristics surely became source of inspiration for artists and artisans working in the rest of the country.
A similar decoration could be seen on a dish in the Victoria & Albert Museum in London (inv. C.1428-1910).
