A blue and white vase with peacocks, meiping Yuan Dynasty

robustly potted with high broad round shoulders sloping down towards the tapered body, painted with a wide band enclosing a pair of peacocks, the female with outstretched wings, the male displaying his elaborate plummage, both frolicking on a dense peony scroll ground with mulitple views of the peony flower heads, attendant buds, and tendrils, below a cloud-lappet collar draped over the shoulders enclosing alternating flowers of peonies and chrysanthemums, set between a thin band of classic scroll below the short everted neck and a 'cash' circle band below the shoulders, the foot encircled by double rows of upright and pendant lappets

Apart from the slight greyish tinge to the cobalt blue, the overall structure of the vase is very good. There are a couple areas of minor pinholes, light surface scratches and a 1 cm original chip to the foot.
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This elegant meiping is most unusual in its delicate outline-and-wash painting style and for the design of a pair of peacocks amongst peonies as the main motif on the central design band. More common are Yuan vases of this form with the central design band boldly painted with the classic lotus or peony scroll design, with figures in landscape or with dragons pursuing a flaming pearl. No other similar example appears to be recorded, although the peacock and peony design can be found on Yuan jars; for example see a jar with handles in the British Museum, London, illustrated in Ye Peilan, Yuandai ciqi, Beijing, 1998, pl. 76; a guan-shaped jar sold in our London rooms, 20^th June 2001, lot 45; and another guan sold in these rooms, 18^th May 1982, lot 22, from the collection of Frederick Knight. Compare also the peacock and peony motif painted on pear-shaped vases such as the vase from a hoard find in Kulun Banner, Inner Mongolia, ibid., pl. 105; and on flat-sided flasks such as the flask in the Matsuoka Museum of Art, Tokyo, ibid., pl.109.

For examples of Yuan vessels decorated in this fine painterly style, see a meiping sold in these rooms, 25^th April 2004, lot 285; and a large dragon-decorated jar from the Hobart collection in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, illustrated in Oriental Ceramics. The World's Great Collections, vol. 10, Tokyo, 1980, col. pl. 43.

Compare also a meiping painted in the more customary style included in John Alexander Pope, Chinese Porcelains from the Ardebil Shrine, Washington D.C., 1956, pl. 25 bottom right; another included in the Min Chiu Society exhibition An Anthology of Chinese Ceramics, Hong Kong Museum of Art, Hong Kong, 1980, cat.no. 71; and two further examples with peony bloom decoration in the central design band, originally probably forming a pair, and now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and the Idemitsu Museum of Arts, Tokyo, respectively, included in the exhibition Chinese Art Under the Mongols: The Yuan Dynasty, Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, 1968, cat.no. 138, and in Chinese Ceramics in the Idemitsu Collection, Tokyo, 1987, pl. 138.