AN EXCEPTIONAL AND IMPORTANT BLUE AND WHITE 'DRAGON AND PHOENIX' VASE, MEIPING, YUAN DYNASTY
This lot is from a single owner collection and is therefore offered without reserve

Published:
1. Jean-Paul Desroches (ed.) et al, Two Americans in Paris. A Quest for Asian Art, Paris, 2016, p. 171, no. 280.
2. Pointe-à-Callière Museum, Two Americans in Paris. A Quest for Asian Art, Montréal, 2016, exhibition album, p. 41.
3. Marie Favereau (ed.) et al, Les Mongols et le monde. L’autre visage de l'empire de Gengis Khan, Musée d'Histoire de Nantes & Chinggis Khaan National Museum, 2023, p. 275.

Exhibited:
1. Pointe-à-Callière Museum, From the Lands of Asia. The Sam and Myrna Myers Collection, Montréal, 17 November 2016-19 March 2017.
2. Kimbell Art Museum, From the Lands of Asia. The Sam and Myrna Myers Collection, Fort Worth, Texas, 4 March-19 August 2018.
3. Musée d’Histoire de Nantes, Les Mongols et le monde. L’autre visage de l'empire de Gengis Khan, 14 October 2023-5 May 2024.

External Expert Authentication: This lot was previously authenticated and dated by Regina Krahl, confirming the dating stated above. Krahl has written an essay for this exceptional piece, titled ‘Dragon-and-Phoenix Meiping: A Quintessential Yuan Vessel’, which is reproduced verbatim in its entirety further below, along with supplementary images selected by us.

Regina Krahl (b. 1951) is an eminent independent researcher and a leading authority on Chinese ceramics and early porcelain. A former President of the Oriental Ceramic Society, she worked as Acting Curator of Chinese Ceramics at the British Museum, and as Academic Advisor and Consulting Curator for the Sir Percival David Collection. She acted as Curator or Advisor for many international museums including the Asia Society, Guggenheim Museum, Brooklyn Museum of Art, Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Art Institute of Chicago, Cleveland Museum of Art, the Royal Academy of Arts in London, Musée Cernuschi in Paris, and National Museum of History in Taipei. Krahl has lectured and published widely on Chinese ceramics and other works of art. Her many publications include Chinese Ceramics in the Topkapi Saray Museum, Istanbul (3 volumes, 1986, ed. John Ayers) and Chinese Ceramics from the Meiyintang Collection (4 volumes, 1994-2010). She co-edited Ancient Trade Ceramics from The British Museum (1994), Chinese Ceramics: Highlights of the Sir Percival David Collection (2009), and Shipwrecked: Tang Treasures and Monsoon Winds (2010).

China, 14^th century. Powerfully and robustly potted with high and broad shoulders sloping down towards the tapering ovoid body. Exquisitely painted in rich cobalt blue tones, the body with a central band enclosing two sinuous dragons pursuing flaming pearls amid clouds and flames, below a band with two phoenixes surrounded by leafy peony sprays and scrolling vines encircling the shoulder, and above a band of pendent lotus blossoms within tall lappets, all framed by double-line borders and divided by two further ‘empty’ white bands.

Provenance: Hôtel Drouot, Paris, circa 1990s. The Collection of Sam and Myrna Myers, Paris, France, acquired from the above. At the time of the Meiping’s sale at Drouot, “the small neck was missing”, see Sam Myers, “The Search for a Yuan Vase”, Two Americans in Paris. A Quest for Asian Art, Paris, 2016, p. 170. The neck was subsequently reconstructed by a professional restorer commissioned by Sam and Myrna Myers.
Condition: Good condition, commensurate with age, and presenting superbly. Some old wear and firing irregularities, including scattered dark spots, minute pits, and kiln grit. The base with old, partially smoothed chips along the foot. The neck has been reconstructed above the very first double circle on the shoulder. A small area of touchup (approx. 3 cm long) on one of the plain bands. None of the blue and white paintwork has been affected by either repair.

Weight: 3.8 kg
Dimensions: Height 40.7 cm

Dragon-and-Phoenix Meiping: A Quintessential Yuan Vessel
By Regina Krahl

Dragon and phoenix are ubiquitous in Yuan (1279-1368) art, but it is very rare to find a piece of Yuan blue-and-white decorated with both these mythical creatures.

In the Yuan capitals Dadu in Beijing and Shangdu in Inner Mongolia, dragons and phoenixes were ubiquitous. They decorated carved stone panels [fig. 1], posts and balustrades of palace buildings, and alternated on the green-and-yellow end tiles of palace roofs (James C.Y. Watt, ed., The World of Khubilai Khan. Chinese Art in the Yuan Dynasty, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2010, figs 53 and 54, fig. 101, and fig. 282; Da Yuan san du/The Capital Cities of Yuan Dynasty, Capital Museum, Beijing, 2016, pp. 72-3; and Chūgoku Uchi Mōko hoppō kiba minzoku bunbutsu ten [Exhibition of cultural relics from the northern horsemen of Inner Mongolia, China], Tokyo, 1983, cat. nos 102-3 and 4).

Emperor Wenzong (r. 1330-1332), his brother and both their wives wore dragon-ornamented garments, when they had themselves immortalized as donors on a tapestry mandala [figs. 2-4] they had commissioned (Watt, op.cit., pp. 110-114 and fig. 146). Dragons and phoenixes appeared on silver ware of the period, on lacquer ware, on textiles, on Cizhou ceramics, and on a huge jade bowl in Beijing that impressed foreign visitors such as the Italian friar Odoric of Pordenone (1286–1331) (Watt, op.cit., passim). Dragon and phoenix appear also as decoration on a lute (pipa) depicted on the Juyongguan toll gate on the Great Wall outside Beijing, that was built between 1342 and 1345 (Sherman E. Lee & Wai-kam Ho, Chinese Art under the Mongols. The Yüan Dynasty (1279-1368), The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, 1968, p. 8, fig. 2).

The impression on foreign visitors of a Chinese realm frequented by dragons and phoenixes must have been overwhelming and is seen reflected, as if in mirror image, in the decoration of the Persian palace Takht-i Sulaiman, the only excavated palace site of the Mongol period in Iran. Built around the 1270s, the palace walls here were faced with local lustre tiles painted with dragon and phoenix designs [figs. 5-6] in unmistakable Yuan style (Linda Komaroff & Stefano Carboni, The Legacy of Genghis Khan. Courtly Art and Culture in Western Asia, 1256-1353, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2002, figs 59, 97, 100-1-2, cats. 84, 86, 99-101, and p. 74).

In Yuan blue-and-white decoration, the mythical creatures also feature frequently, but rarely together. Dragon and phoenix appear of course on the iconic ‘David vases’ of 1351, but there they are painted in a very different style. Peter Y.K. Lam has discussed dragon designs on Yuan blue-and-white in a symposium in Shanghai, and has discerned five different manners of dragon representation (Peter Y. K. Lam, ‘Dragons on Yuan Blue-and-Whites as Seen from the Bands on the David Vases’, in Li Zhongmou et al., eds, Youlan shencai. 2012 Shanghai Yuan qinghua guoji xueshu yantaohui lunwenji/Splendors in Smalt. Art of Yuan Blue-and-white Porcelain Proceedings, Shanghai, 2015, vol. 2, pp. 194-205, fig. 7). The five types of dragons do not seem to signal different periods of creation, however, but perhaps different workshops or different destinations of the final products.

What is particularly unusual on the present meiping is its sparse style of decoration, with bands of blue design alternating with bands in plain white. This style is extremely rare and the only closely related vases appear to be four meiping discovered in the famous hoard of over two hundred pieces of blue-and-white, underglaze-red and monochrome white Jingdezhen porcelains and Longquan celadons of the Yuan dynasty, discovered in Gaoan, a county southwest of Nanchang, not far from Jingdezhen (Liu Jincheng, ed., Gaoan Yuandai jiaocang ciqi/The Porcelain from the Cellar of the Yuan Dynasty in Gao’an, Beijing, 2006).

The Gaoan hoard is believed to have belonged to the influential Wu family of Wujiacun [‘Wu Family Village’] at Shangquan in Gaoan. Two members of that family are particularly noted, Wu Xingfu, a consort of an Imperial princess, and his son Wu Liangcheng, both government officials at Dadu, the principle Yuan capital, in the latter part of the dynasty. Wu Liangcheng is believed to have returned to his home village and to have buried the family treasures before the fall of the Yuan dynasty. The hoard most likely dates from the time when peasant revolts rocked the area, particularly in the 11th and 12th years of the Zhizheng reign (1341-1368).

The hoard contained a total of six blue-and-white meiping [fig. 7], all of similar size as the present piece but with covers, four very similarly decorated and two with floral designs replacing dragons and phoenixes (ibid., frontispiece and pp. 52-63). These six blue-and-white meiping were each inscribed in ink on the bases and inside the covers with the term for one of the six ‘arts’ desirable for a Confucian-educated gentleman to master: rites (li), rulership (yu), mathematics (shu), calligraphy (shu), music (yue), and shooting (she) – a most unusual treatment, but one that is considered to be in keeping with the ideology of Wu Liangcheng, who is known to have been a strong advocate of the Confucian classics.

The Gaoan meiping are very similarly decorated with pairs of phoenixes, distinguished by their tails, hovering among peonies – a combination signalling wishes for wealth and honour –, pairs of dragons among clouds, one looking forward, one turning back, and lotus blossoms in petal panels. Only three of the Gaoan pieces, however, also feature four-clawed dragons like the present vase, while on the fourth the dragons are three-clawed. The painting manner of the dragons and phoenixes on our vase differs from that of the Gaoan vases and does not appear to be by the same hand, but the lotus-filled petals around the base are very similar particularly to two of the Gaoan meiping and may well have been added by the same painter.

This fact and the rarity of this general decoration style with white borders between the design friezes, which in the Gaoan hoard is also found on a pair of guan jars [fig. 8] (ibid., pp. 48-51), strongly suggest that the present vase was done at the same time as those of the Wu family – presumably prior to the 1350s – and may have had a Chinese owner of similar standing. This style of decoration is not associated with Yuan blue-and-white exported abroad, and Liu Jincheng (ibid., p. 12 and p. 23) stresses the fact that such rare and important porcelains could only have been obtained by the Wus due to their close contacts to the Imperial house. This ethereal design concept was probably more in line with Chinese taste than the horror-vacui painting manner of most Yuan blue-and-white wares, which in the collector’s handbook Gegu yaolun (The Essential Criteria of Antiquities) by Cao Zhao of 1388 were still dismissed as ‘vulgar’ (Sir Percival David, Chinese Connoisseurship: The Ko Ku Yao Lun: The Essential Criteria of Antiquities, London, 1971, p. 143 and pl. 40b).

A decoration in bands, separated by plain white areas, is otherwise extremely rare, but can also be seen on the much published meiping [fig. 9] from the collection of Ataka Eiichi, now in the Museum of Oriental Ceramics, Osaka, where the upper band, however, shows a lotus scroll, the central one a peony scroll, and the shape is somewhat different in its proportions; see Tōyō tōji no tenkai/Masterpieces of Oriental Ceramics, The Museum of Oriental Ceramics, Osaka, 1999, pl. 32; and Mikami Tsugio, Sekai tōji zenshū/Ceramic Art of the World, vol. 13: Ryō, Kin, Gen/Liao, Chin and Yuan Dynasties, Tokyo, 1981, col. pl. 58.

Meiping are believed to have been used for storing wine and are in wall paintings in tombs often depicted in connection with the preparation of feasts [figs. 10-11]. Dragons and phoenixes often form the decoration of yuhuchun bottles and stem bowls, which in banquets may have been used together with meiping; see Youlan shencai. Yuandai qinghua ciqi teji/Splendors in Smalt. Art of Yuan Blue-and-white Porcelain, Shanghai Museum, Shanghai, 2012, cat. nos 21, 66, and 75-77.

Auction result comparison:
Type: Closely related
Auction: Poly Auctions, Beijing, 19 June 2018, lot 5147
Price: CNY 2,990,000 or approx. EUR 385,000 converted and adjusted for inflation at the time of writing
Description: A large blue and white meiping vase with a scene of figures, Yuan dynasty
Expert remark: Compare the closely related form and decoration with similar lappet and empty white bands, peony sprays, and size (43.7 cm). Note the figural subject.

Auction result comparison:
Type: Related
Auction: Poly Auctions, Beijing, 6 December 2010, lot 5273
Price: CNY 12,880,000 or approx. EUR 2,000,000 converted and adjusted for inflation at the time of writing
Description: A blue and white ‘peacock and peonies’ meiping vase, Yuan dynasty
Expert remark: Compare the related form and decoration with similar empty white bands and phoenix-and-peony design. Note the size (52.5 cm).