Fat, porslin. Qingdynastin med Daoguangs märke och period (1821-50).

Gustaf Oscar Wallenberg (1865-1937), Stockholm, and thence by descent within the family.

Gustaf O. Wallenberg was a Swedish businessman, diplomat and active politician. He was the son of André Oscar Wallenberg, founder of Stockholm Enskilda Bank (today's Skandinaviska Enskilda Banken, known as SEB). After a career in the Swedish Navy he turned to the business world and was active in improving the transoceanic shipping industry.

Wallenberg was Sweden's Envoy to Tokyo between 1907-1918. In April 1907 he travelled to Beijing to amend the Treaty of Canton (1847) between Sweden-Norway and China and to establish diplomatic relations between Sweden and the Qing Court. As the Swedish Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary at the Court of Peking, he successfully negotiated and signed with Lien Fang, the Guangxu Emperor's High Commissioner Plenipotentiary and Senior Vice-President of the Wai Wu Pu, the Treaty of Amity, Commerce and Navigation, between Sweden and China, which was signed in Beijing on 2 July 1908, with an additional article signed on 24 May 1909.

The collection was acquired between 1907 and 1918 when Wallenberg was the Swedish Envoy in Tokyo, and possibly during his diplomatic service in China. Documents preserved at the Östasiatiska Museum in Stockholm demonstrate the importance of Gustaf Wallenberg and his extensive connections with the Qing government to the Swedish engineers and businessmen who were in China during this period, such as Johan Gunnar Andersson, Osvald Siren, Orvar Karlbeck, Erik Nordstrom and many more.

Gustaf Wallenberg was the grandfather of Raoul Gustaf Wallenberg (1912-1945), an architect, businessman, and diplomat. Raoul Wallenberg has been designated by Yad Vashem as one of the Righteous Among Nations, as well as having many monuments and streets named after him in honour of him saving thousands of Jews in German-occupied Hungary during the Second World War, while serving as Sweden's Special Envoy in Budapest. As he lost his father the same year he was born, he was brought up also by his grandfather Gustaf Wallenberg, with the Chinese porcelain collection around him, inheriting part of the collection when his grandfather passed away in 1937. He died at a time unknown between 1945 and 1947, further to his detention in Budapest by General Malinovsky in 1944, and arrest by the Soviet authorities. Further to his disappearance his part of the Chinese collection was deposited at the Östasiatiska Museum in Stockholm, and later released to the family.

Yellow-ground enamelled famille-rose bowls with this pattern on the exterior, and five iron-red bats on the interior appear to have been made as early as the second year of the Qianlong reign, as noted by the Palace Museum in The Complete Treasures of the Palace Museum: Porcelains with Cloisonné Enamel Decoration and Famille Rose Decoration, Hong Kong, 1999, p. 205, no. 181. See another bowl with similar design but with a six-character seal mark in underglaze blue in the British Museum, London, illustrated in H. Moss, By Imperial Command, Hong Kong, 1976, pl. 6.

Compare also a bowl of the same period as this dish in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Credit Line: Purchase by subscription, 1879. Accession Number: 79.2.536.

Compare a pair of bowls with this kind of decoration from the collection of A. W. Bahr (1877-1959), illustrated in Old Chinese Porcelain and Works of Art in China, London, 1911, p. 137, pl. XCVI, and later sold at Christies, Hong Kong rooms, 15th November 1988, lot 32, from the collection of Paul and Helen Bernat.

For a more recent sale comparison; see Bonhams, Fine Chinese Ceramics and Works of Art 30 May 2017, lot no 122.