324.
A POLYCHROME ENAMELED WILD BOAR’S HEAD SHAPED TUREEN AND COVER
Qing dynasty, Qianlong period, circa 1760
29 cm high
Provenance: Naples, Villa della Floridiana, Museo Duca di Martina, Placido de Sangro (1829-1891) collection.
inv. n. 4867
William R. Sargent (W.R. Sargent, The Copeland Collection. Chinese and Japanese Ceramic Figures, Salem 1991, p. 202), discussing a similar piece from the Copeland collection in the Peabody Essex Museum, refers about an order of twenty-five boar’s head tureens made by the Dutch East India Company in 1763, followed the next year by another order of nineteen similar pieces, which was probably the last because “the supergargoes considered them too risky”.
Animal head tureen were very appreciated in Europe toward the mid eighteenth century, and many ceramic factories (among them Chelsea and Strasbourg) produced such kind of table ware toward that time (D.L. Fennimore – P.A. Halfpenny, The Campbell Collection of Soup Tureens at Winterthur, Winterthur 2000, pp. 148, 173).
A very similar tureen is in the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art (inv. 1956-107-9a,b); see also the item in the Victoria & Albert Museum, London (C. Clunas (edited by), Chinese Export Art and Design, London 1987, pp. 74-75).
