A large Swatow dish, Ming dynasty, circa 1600.
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Deep circular dish painted in turquoise, black, iron-red and green enamel with gently everted rim, painted in the centre with a barefoot artist wandering in a landscape holding a branch supporting a long-tailed bird, with a rucksack of scrolls and gourd, a further rolled scroll sits on an easel extending from his rucksack. Next to him a deer, all set in a landscape with rockwork, bamboo and beneath a large chrysanthemum. The decoration is encircled by a lappet band of flowers and branches, the cavetto painted with four large lobed reserves, two with birds perched amongst aster and camellias and two with lotus flowerheads, all between chilong dragon roundels on an iron-red diaper ground of cash and cross-hatch. The underside plain, the base and foot rim with sand grit. Diameter 38.5 cm.
Firing spots.
Provenance
From the Collection of Heidi Boyce Broström (1943-2022) and Dan Axel Broström (1915-1976).
Dan Axel Broström was the third-generation ship-owner in the prestigious Broström Company group. When he took over the firm in 1949 they had 18 000 employees.
The Canadian model and geologist Heidi was Dan-Axel Broströms third wife, the couple lived at the fashionable Särö, a few miles south of Gothenburg.
Exhibitions
Compare: Collection of Sakamoto Gorō (1926-2016). Sotheby's New York, 17th March 2015, lot 41.
Literature
A similar dish is as the one with the figure and the deer is included by Jorge Welsh in Zhangzhou Export Ceramics, The So-called Swatow Wares, 2006, no. 26, pp. 124-7, where he notes the figure depicted may represent the Daoist immortal Lan Cai-he or Han Xiang-zi.
Another dish of this design, the four roundels in the cavetto with the Chinese characters yu tang jia qi ‘the hall full of beautiful treasures’, is illustrated by Yoneyama Torataro in The Seikado Bunko Art Museum catalogue of Swatow Wares of the Seikado Collection, no. 34, p. 41.
