AN EXTREMELY RARE AND IMPORTANT CLOISONNÉ ENAMEL AND GILT-BRONZE ‘MONK’S CAP’ EWER AND COVER EARLY MING DYNASTY |

masterfully cast with a compressed globular body rising from a splayed foot to a flared cylindrical neck, surmounted by a galleried monk’s cap rim, the neck flanked by a wide strap handle beginning and ending with ruyi-shaped tabs and a tall curved spout echoed in the form of the well-fitted cover, all below a bud-shaped finial, the bulbous body of the vessel outstandingly decorated with lobed cartouches enclosing stylised lotus blooms wreathed by scrolling foliage, all rendered with five striking enamels of five main colours, namely a pale mustardy yellow, a glassy emerald green, a rich lapis lazuli blue, a soft red and an opaque white, the neck similarly enamelled with lobed cartouches enclosing blossoms of camellia, peony and pomegranate respectively, the two main registers divided by pendent lotus lappets repeated in an upright fashion above the classic scroll-bordered foot, all below lotus and composite floral scroll friezes encircling the outer and inner rim, all against a turquoise ground, the strap handle decorated with a lotus flower springing from the mouth of a two-legged makara against a lapis lazuli blue ground, the long spout correspondingly enamelled against a rich blue ground with lotus blooms, the gilt base incised with a double vajra, the turquoise-ground cover with a skilfully corresponding form, colour scheme and design, superbly accentuated with floral bands encircling petal lappets and the bud-shaped finial

The ewer is in superb condition with some insignificant infilled flakes and small touched up areas.
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Monk’s Cap Ewer in Rainbow Colours
Regina Krahl Colours are of prime importance in Tibetan Buddhism. Enlightenment is achieved when the material body is transformed into immaterial five-coloured ‘rainbow light’ and the human body becomes a ‘rainbow body’. The five main colours blue, white, red, green and yellow each have their own significance and symbolic association. In the Yongle period (1403-1424), places of Tibetan Buddhist worship that received imperial patronage and were fitted out by the country’s foremost artisans working on behalf of the Emperor, must have been breath-taking in their combination of gold and bright, contrasting primary colours. This vivid polychromy is reflected in well-preserved Tibetan thangkas and other Buddhist images, whether painted, woven or embroidered, for example, the important silk embroidery featuring Yamantaka-Vajrabhairava in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (James C.Y. Watt and Denise Patry Leidy, Defining Yongle. Imperial Art in Early Fifteenth-Century China, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2005, pl. 35 and p. 60) (fig. 1), but is hardly found in any other medium in the early Ming dynasty (1368-1644). No object could better have responded to this adoration of colours and gold than a cloisonné vessel such as this ewer.

China’s emperors supported Tibetan Buddhism already in the Yuan (1279-1368), and in the early Ming dynasty Tibetan monks were omnipresent at the Chinese court. The Yongle Emperor was particularly active in his patronage of Buddhism. He restored the Baoensi monastery in Nanjing and had the extravagant Porcelain Pagoda erected there in honour of his deceased wife. He repeatedly reached out to the Tibetan Buddhist clergy, trying to coax the most influential spiritual leaders to visit the capital, in the hope of thereby boosting his own standing, which was not undisputed due to controversies concerning his ascension of the throne. His repeated invitations to Tsongkhapa (1357-1419), the founder of the Yellow Hat sect, remained fruitless, as the revered monk only dispatched one of his main disciples to represent him. Yet in 1407 he received the most influential Tibetan lama, Deshin Shekpa, the Fifth Karmapa, also known as Halima (1384-1415), at court in Nanjing to hold religious services for the Emperor’s deceased parents (fig. 2). The many wonders Halima performed on this occasion included the appearance in the sky of rainbows and multi-coloured clouds. The Emperor had these colourful phenomena eternalized by court artists in paintings (Craig Clunas and Jessica Harrison-Hall, eds, Ming. Fifty Years that Changed China, The British Museum, London, 2014, fig. 208 and pp. 240f.).

Occasions like these required gifts, which the Emperor commissioned from the main imperial workshops he patronized: those making porcelains, lacquer, cloisonné and silks. As the Yongle Emperor engaged the workshops for court service, he sparked off an unprecedented flowering of the arts, that continued into the Xuande reign (1426-1435), and some of the most spectacular works of the early fifteenth century executed in these media are items designed for use in Buddhist ceremonies. Cloisonné pieces of the period are, however, exceedingly rare. The present ewer is one of only two examples known to have survived, the other still preserved in Lhasa, Tibet. Such vessels would have made the ultimate imperial gift to a Buddhist dignitary.

The beginnings of the cloisonné technique in China are still debated, but the technique is now generally believed to have been introduced to China, possibly from Byzantium, in the Yuan dynasty. While the chronology of the earliest wares is still in need of more evidence to become properly established, the cloisonné production of the early fifteenth century is on much firmer ground. We know pieces with Xuande reign marks as well as unmarked vessels closely related to them, which reflect the general style of the period as expressed also in contemporary works in other media and can thus be attributed to the Yongle and Xuande reigns. In its shape, decoration and the quality of its enamels, the present piece fits right into this group.

On the customary turquoise ground, it shows the five main colours: a pale mustardy yellow, a glassy emerald green, a sparkling lapis lazuli blue, a soft red and an opaque white, the surface speckled overall with fine bubbles. The quality and tones of the enamels are characteristic of early cloisonné pieces; they are very similar, for example, to a box and an incense burner in the Musée des Arts Decoratifs, Paris, attributed to the early Ming or earlier (Béatrice Quette, ed., Cloisonné: Chinese Enamels from the Yuan, Ming, and Qing Dynasties, Bard Graduate Center, New York, 2011, p. x; p.34, fig. 3.6; p. 97, fig. 5.28; cat. nos 9 and 14). The incense burner also shows similar combinations of two colours in single cloisons, for example for lotus leaves, which often have red or yellow tips.

The ewer boasts in addition one extremely rare enamel, a pink created by mixing white and red enamels, called by Quette (op.cit., p. 9 and p. 35) ‘Ming pink’ (or even ‘Yuan pink’) to distinguish it from the Jesuit-introduced rose-pink of the eighteenth century. On the ewer, it is judiciously used, only to pick out the inside of the makara’s snout on the handle, which in depictions is often given special treatment; in the embroidery illustrated in fig. 1, for example, it is highlighted in red and white stripes. This exclusive pink has similarly been used for a detail on the base of the box in the Musée des Arts Décoratifs mentioned above, to depict the small flowers of a weed in a lotus bouquet (Quette, op.cit., fig. 6.13 and cat. no. 9).

The main decoration of the ewer consists of ‘foreign lotus’ (fan lian), a stylized version of the lotus flower that is accompanied by scrolls with fanciful foliation instead of naturalistic leaves – a motif used in endless variations in this period, particularly in a Buddhist context. The dragon-like makara, with two legs, a long scrolling tail and a lotus flower springing from its mouth, echoes the polychrome animals flanking many Buddhist images, for example the multiple heads of the deity in the Metropolitan Museum embroidery (fig. 1). Petal-panel borders are taken from the formalized petals on lotus thrones of Buddhist figures. The double vajra on the base is also well known from the bases of gilt-bronze Buddhist sculptures. All these are classic Buddhist motifs of the early Ming. The three additional flowers on the neck of our ewer on the other hand, depicting stylized versions of camellia, peony and pomegranate, which together with the lotus can be read as Flowers of the Four Seasons, would seem to be a secular and purely Chinese component.

Monk’s cap ewers derive their shape from Tibetan ewers used in Buddhist rituals, originally made of metal or wood. Versions with straight sides have been copied in qingbai porcelain already in the Yuan (James C.Y. Watt, ed., The World of Khubilai Khan. Chinese Art in the Yuan Dynasty, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2010, fig. 123). The present shape, with globular body, also seems to predate the Ming dynasty. A white porcelain prototype in the Capital Museum, Beijing, of this form but of different proportions, was excavated from a tomb in Haiding district, Beijing, and has been attributed to the Yuan dynasty (Watt, op.cit., fig. 298). With its open, pointed spout, which is echoed in the form of the cover, it is one of the most eccentric shapes of the period.

The form of monk’s cap that may have provided the model for these ewers is uncertain, but Tibetan priests such as Deshin Shekpa, or Shakya Yeshe (1354-1435), the representative of Tsongkhapa, who was sent on his behalf to the Yongle court, are usually depicted wearing a stiff black headdress with a staggered outline, which could be compared to the rims of these ewers (see the small figure in the top right-hand corner of fig. 1, and fig. 2; also Clunas and Harrison-Hall, op.cit., fig. 209).

With its well-fitting lid, that closes off even its spout, it was probably used to hold hot liquid, possibly Tibetan buttered tea. A monk’s cap ewer can be seen in a somewhat later Tibetan painted textile, placed next to some pear-shaped bottles in front of a Buddhist altar that is set with bowls of fruit, a flower vase and other offerings for Avalokiteshvara and other deities; see Watt and Leidy, op.cit., pl. 36 (fig. 3).

The only comparable cloisonné vessel known to be preserved is a ewer today preserved in the Tibet Museum, Lhasa, which retains its custom-made red-lacquered, gilt-decorated wooden container (Ming Yongle Xuande wenwu tezhan/Splendours from the Yongle (1403-1424) and Xuande (1426-1435) Reigns of China’s Ming Dynasty, Palace Museum, Beijing, 2010, cat. no. 141) (fig. 4). The Lhasa ewer is very similar, but not identical to the present piece. It differs in many small details, also appears to be very slightly smaller, and thus shows variations that may represent minimal deliberate adjustments introduced by the workshops over time – a practice well known from the imperial porcelain production of the Xuande period when reproducing Yongle designs. 

Few other important early Ming cloisonné pieces intended for Buddhist use are known, except for incense burners: a pair of altar vases with lotus scrolls between petal-panel borders was sold in our rooms, one from the collections of Mrs. J.M. Hanbury, Mariquita Sedgwick and Dr. Pierre Uldry, illustrated in Helmut Brinker and Albert Lutz, Chinese Cloisonné. The Pierre Uldry Collection, London, 1989, col. pl. 9, first sold at Christie’s London, 26th October 1964, lot 61, was sold in our London rooms, 2nd July 1968, lot 48; the other from the collection of Jules Speelman, sold in these rooms, 3rd April 2018, lot 3428, and now in the Le Cong Tang collection, is illustrated in Ritual and Colour. Important Cloisonné Vessels from the Le Cong Tang Collection, Sotheby’s Hong Kong, 2018, cat. no. 2, together with three different early Ming cloisonné kundika vessels, cat. nos 3-5. Another early Ming kundika from the Kitson collection, sold in our London rooms, 18th October 1960, lot 104, illustrated in Sir Harry Garner, Chinese and Japanese Cloisonné Enamels, London, 1962, pl. 16, was given by Sir Harry to the British Museum.

In porcelain, monk’s cap ewers could be more easily produced and were created in much greater numbers, both in the Yongle and Xuande periods. Remains of over fifty white ewers of this form were recovered from Stratum Five of the Yongle waste heaps of the Ming imperial kiln site, believed to date from around 1407, some plain, some with incised decoration, and some with incised Tibetan inscriptions; see Jingdezhen Zhushan chutu Yongle Xuande guanyao ciqi zhanlan/Imperial Porcelain of the Yongle and Xuande Periods Excavated from the Site of the Ming Imperial Factory at Jingdezhen, Hong Kong Museum of Art, Hong Kong, 1989, pp. 21f. (Chinese), p. 59, fig. 4 and p. 62 (English), and cat. no. 8. A rare white piece with a Yongle reign mark incorporated into an engraved flower scroll on the neck is illustrated in Regina Krahl, ‘The T.T. Tsui Collection of Chinese Ceramics’, Orientations, December 1989, p. 39, figs 14 and 14a. An unmarked white porcelain ewer and a blue-and-white example with Tibetan inscription and Xuande reign mark, from the Tibet Museum, Lhasa, were included together with Museum’s cloisonné ewer in the exhibition Xueyu cangzhen. Xizang wenwu jinghua/Treasures from Snow Mountains. Gems of Tibetan Cultural Relics, Shanghai Museum, Shanghai, 2001, cat. nos 88-90.

A painting executed for the future Yongzheng Emperor (r. 1723-1735) shows an extremely rare monochrome copper-red piece exhibited in a display cabinet, perhaps the unmarked example later inscribed with a poem by the Qianlong Emperor (r. 1736-1795) and today preserved in the National Palace Museum (Feng Mingzhu, ed., Yongzheng. Qing Shizong wenwu dazhan/Harmony and Integrity. The Yongzheng Emperor and His Times, National Palace Museum, Taipei, 2009, p. 126, cat no. I-62; and Mingdai Xuande guanyao jinghua tezhan tulu/Catalogue of the Special Exhibition of Selected Hsüan-te Imperial Porcelains of the Ming Dynasty, National Palace Museum, Taipei, 1998, cat. no. 29) (fig. 5). Polychrome decoration on porcelains had only begun to be experimented with in the Xuande reign, but was still extremely rare and at first seems to have been applied only to dishes, bowls and stem bowls, but not to more complex shapes (Treasures from Snow Mountains, op.cit., cat. no. 94).