summer exhibition 2008

164 Pages·2009·4.44 MB·English

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Roger Keverne
2nd Floor, 16 Clifford Street
London W1S 3RG
Telephone: [phone]
Facsimile: 020 7434 9101
[email protected]
www.keverne.co.uk
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FINE AND RARE CHINESE
WORKS OF ART AND CERAMICS
SUMMER EXHIBITION
Roger Keverne
2nd Floor, 16 Clifford Street
London W1S 3RG
Telephone: [phone]
Facsimile: 020 7434 9101
[email protected]
www.keverne.co.uk
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INTRODUCTION
We are pleased to present our 2008 Summer exhibition catalogue. We look
forward to welcoming those who travel to London this season to our gallery,
and hope that you will enjoy the works of art we are offering for sale, most
of which have rested for some time in collections all over the world, some
distinguished and famous, and some lesser known.
There were some collectors active in the first half of the twentieth century
who were ahead of their time in the connoisseurship and appreciation of
works in Chinese taste, as opposed to export art or that inspired by the
taste for Chinoiserie. Among that group of collectors, we are delighted to
include works of art once belonging to Alfred and Ivy Clark, D. David-Weill,
Sir Harry Garner, Sir Herbert Ingram and Raymond Riesco. C. T. Loo
was a pioneering dealer and collector whose reputation is widespread
and whose private collection gives an insight into the taste prevalent
during his time, and we are very pleased to offer for sale a rare gold finial
once belonging to him.
I would like to thank the following people for their hard work and
dedication in the production of this catalogue: Ken Adlard for the
photography; Amanda Brookes for the design; Anthony Evans for some
of the translations; Paul Forty for the proofreading; Richard Owers
of Beacon Press, which is a carbon neutral printer, for the printing;
Katharine Butler and Melissa Williamson for co-ordinating the project;
and Miranda Clarke for the catalogue preparation. I am also very
grateful to Dr Wang Tao for translating the inscriptions on the archaic
Chinese bronzes and for his insightful comments about them.
Roger Keverne
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CONTENTS
METAL 5
CERAMIC 23
ENAMEL 63
JADE & HARDSTONE 85
ORGANIC 125
PAINTING 147
BIBLIOGRAPHY 156
CHRONOLOGY 160
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metal
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6 ROGER KEVERNE SUMMER 2008
1
A pair of rare archaic bronze wine vessels (fanglei )
Early Western Zhou dynasty
Height: 10Iand 10Din, 26.7 and 26 cm
each of rectangular section with a sloping, moulded foot, steeply flaring sides, a gently rounded
shoulder, set with two loop handles issuing from animal masks, and a very slightly flaring neck;
the domed cover is surmounted by a tall knop. The shoulder is cast with a narrow frieze of
whorl bosses, divided by prominent animal masks on the long sides and the handles on the
short sides, between pairs of bowstring lines; another pair of bowstring lines surrounds the
neck. The cover is similarly decorated with whorl bosses separated by low-relief headdress
motifs. The interior of each cover is cast with a two-character inscription, reading “Prince Zhi”.
The golden bronze surface is almost entirely covered with cuprite, malachite and azurite
encrustation.
Fanglei appeared in the vessel repertory in the late Shang period and had disappeared before
the middle of the Western Zhou. Small examples, such as these, appear to be very rare and it
is most unusual to find a pair of fanglei. This pair of vessels, while dating to the early Western
Zhou, was commissioned by a Shang noble. The designation “Prince” also refers to the chief
of a clan, and after the Zhou conquered the Shang, a number of Shang royal clans were
moved to Luoyang.
Rawson illustrates a vessel of this shape in Western Zhou Ritual Bronzes from the Arthur M.
Sackler Collections, no. 94, pp. 605–07, where she notes that plain fanglei were produced in
both Shang and Zhou times and were used alongside elaborately decorated examples.
A Western Zhou example of very similar form in the collection of the Shanghai Museum, but
with additional registers of low relief decoration to the neck and foot, is illustrated inZhongguo
Qingtongqi Quanji, Vol. 5, no. 178, p. 170; and see Zhongguo Wenwu Jinghua Da Quan
(Bronze volume), no. 478, p. 138, for another in the Shanghai Museum collection with an
additional lug to the lower front. For another Western Zhou example, lacking a cover and also
with the additional lower lug, see Li, The Shaanxi Bronzes, no. 178, p. 218, excavated in 1976
at Zhuangbai village, Fufeng county, and now in the collection of the Zhouyuan Museum.
Thorp and Bower illustrate a more elaborately decorated late Shang fanglei in Spirit and Ritual:
The Morse Collection of Ancient Chinese Art, no. 3, p. 20. Note also two examples with
similar decoration but lacking a foot in Cohn, Chinese Art, pl. 13, in the collection of the State
Museum in Berlin; and in d’Argencé, Bronze Vessels of Ancient China in the Avery Brundage
Collection, pl. XXVI (left), pp. 68–9.
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