180.
A PAIR OF ‘FAMILLE VERTE’ ‘CADOGAN’ EWERS
Qing dynasty, Kangxi period, early 18th century
13 cm high each
Provenance: Naples, Villa della Floridiana, Museo Duca di Martina, Placido de Sangro (1829-1891) collection.
inv. n. 3864, 3880.
The two ewers shaped as a peach with loop handle and curved spout, the foot decorated with plum flower heads on a green crackled-ice ground, the body with two large four leaf-shaped cartouches with compositions of flowers and rocks reserved on a white floral meander on a red ground, the handles and the spouts with butterflies.
This kind of ewer is known after the name of Lord and Lady Cadogan who brought an object of this kind for the first time in Great Britain in about 1820. The ewer has no opening at the top and could be filled with water from a hole on the base which is then plugged with a cork. The model had a great success stimulating most of the European porcelain factories to realize similar shaped items (see for example the piece made in Meissen around 1725, New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art: Pagodes et dragons. Exotism et fantaisie dan l’Europe rococo 172-1770, exhibition catalogue, Paris 2007, p. 195, n. 80).
A very similar ewer with a European silver mount is in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford (inv. EAX.1364); another from the collection of Augustus the Strong (1670-1733) is now in the Porzellansammlung in Dresden (inv. PO 6585: Pagodes et dragons. Exotism et fantaisie dan l’Europe rococo 172-1770, exhibition catalogue, Paris 2007, p. 163, n. 46).
