Vaser, två stycken, pekingglas. Kina, Qingdynastin.

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.

Compare with an example of a clear blue Peking glass vase in the collection of the Boston Museum of Fine Art. Credit Line, Denman Waldo Ross Collection
Accession Number 17.1165. Dated as Qing dynasty, Yongzheng period 1723–35.

Compare also in the same Museum, Credit Line: William Sturgis Bigelow Collection
Accession Number 11.9705.

Bukowskis sold a part of this collection previously at Bukowskis Sale 554 in 2009 and Bukowskis Sale 556, 2010.

The Art of the Scholars Studio, Oriental Ceramics Society, 1986, page 244. The vases wuld have been to hold a single, elegant floral spray on the scholars desk. The early Ming book on connoisseurship, Gegu Yaolun mentions the use of crystal vases.