A CHINESE PAINTED ENAMEL DISH, QIANLONG PERIOD (1736-1795)

拍品描述

A CHINESE PAINTED ENAMEL DISH, QIANLONG PERIOD (1736-1795) The dish is of broad circular form, its shallow well providing an expansive surface for painted enamel decoration. The principal scene is set within a fine red-line roundel, framed by a wide border of scrolling black foliage reserved against a pale ground, with shaped floral cartouches and red flowerheads punctuating the rim. The enamels are bright and varied, with strong passages of blue, pink, green, yellow and turquoise, applied with the lightness and immediacy characteristic of eighteenth-century Chinese painted enamel work. The central composition depicts a group of musicians and attendants in a landscape garden. Figures are arranged across a gently sloping green ground before blue and orange mountain peaks, with rocks, trees, a balustraded bridge and a pavilion structure creating depth and rhythm. The figures are outlined in fine brown-black line and coloured with transparent washes, their robes and instruments providing points of visual emphasis against the open white ground. The subject appears to represent an outdoor musical gathering, a theme well suited to the refined decorative vocabulary of Qing-period enamel wares. One figure plays a flute beside a pavilion, while another holds a circular percussion instrument and a seated attendant gestures nearby; to the left, a standing figure carries a long instrument case or bundle. The arrangement combines narrative incident with decorative clarity, allowing the figures, architecture and landscape to remain legible within the circular format of the dish. The reverse is more restrained, with a wide pale-green border painted in a crackled pattern around a plain white centre bearing a small pink floral motif. This contrast between the richly animated front and the quieter reverse is typical of painted enamel dishes intended for display as much as use. Produced during the Qianlong period, such wares reflect the Qing court’s taste for luminous colour, ornamental precision and the adaptation of pictorial subjects to elegant domestic forms. This dish is a well-composed Qianlong-period painted enamel example, combining figural narrative, landscape setting and decorative border design with a clear sense of eighteenth-century Chinese courtly taste. Diameter: 27.5 cm

图片