A fine, exceptionally rare and large blue-ground falangcai 'dragon' bowl, Blue-enamel mark and period of Qianlong | 清乾隆 藍地琺瑯彩夔龍紋盌 《乾隆年製》藍料款

Collection of Chutaro Nakano (1862-1939), acquired in the early 20th century.

Christie's Hong Kong, 1st June 2011, lot 3650.

中野忠太郎（1862-1939年）收藏，購於二十世紀初

香港佳士得2011年6月1日，編號3650

A Falangcai Dragon Bowl

Regina Krahl

Falangcai, the porcelains painted inside the Forbidden City under the very eyes of the emperors, who lived practically next door, are more closely connected to the rulers than any other imperial porcelains. They are not ‘official’ wares that would have served at the official functions the emperors had to perform, but were pure luxury items – works of art intended to show-case the ingenuity and proficiency of imperial artists – and were kept in the major palace halls of Qianqinggong (Palace of Heavenly Purity) and Yangxindian (Hall of Mental Cultivation) rather than in palace warehouses. Dragons, which were most important motifs on the official imperial production lines of porcelains from Jingdezhen are virtually absent from their decoration.

It was the Kangxi Emperor (r. 1662 – 1722) who had started the falangcai production in the Forbidden City and who had invited European artisans to the court, so that imperial craftsmen could widen their horizons. Westerners were responsible for the introduction of new enamel colours in that period. The Yongzheng Emperor (r. 1723 – 1735) had dismissed most Europeans from the Forbidden City. The Qianlong Emperor (r. 1736 – 1795) is known to have revered his grandfather, to whom he apparently felt a closer affinity than to his father. He invited artisans from Europe back to the court which resulted in a fruitful exchange of styles and ideas between East and West in the early Qianlong period. As chinoiserie, often incorporating dragon and phoenix motifs, became highly fashionable and ubiquitous in European palace decoration, to a lesser degree stylistic influences from Europe also entered Chinese art, in a trend sometimes called Europeanoiserie.

With its formal four-sided design and coloured background, this falangcai bowl takes up a style of imperial porcelain developed under the Kangxi Emperor. Because of original difficulties of the Beijing imperial workshops to apply the new enamels onto the glossy Jingdezhen porcelain glaze, partly unglazed pieces were then ordered from Jingdezhen and the enamels applied onto the biscuit. Bowls were often decorated with four large, stylized flower heads, regularly spaced around the outside, joined by thin stems and foliage and set against an overall coloured ground so as to hide the rough, unglazed porcelain body. The inside of the bowls was glazed and remained undecorated; see, such a bowl, also with a blue ground, and with a pink enamel Kangxi reign mark, in the Shanghai Museum, illustrated in Wang Qingzheng, ed., Kangxi Porcelain Wares from the Shanghai Museum Collection, Hong Kong, 1998, no. 94 (fig. 1). 

Once the application and firing of enamels on the glaze had been mastered in the Yongzheng reign, the falangcai painters quickly replaced the earlier designs with freely painted nature and landscape scenes echoing ink painting, mostly on a white ground; colour-ground Yongzheng falangcai is rare.

Under the Qianlong Emperor, falangcai porcelains changed once again, but the new style was a revival that harked back to the Kangxi period. The outsides of bowls, in the Kangxi reign fully covered with enamels by necessity, were now completely enamelled by choice, and in the case of the present piece, even the formal four-sided design concept was copied; new was decoration on the vessels’ inside. The present bowl is unusual, however, in showing a plain ground colour; typically, the background to the design was in the Qianlong reign accentuated by overall patterning reminiscent of brocade, incised through the enamel down to the white glaze, to make the appearance more lavish and opulent; see a pair of smaller Qianlong falangcai bowls with formal floral motifs on such a ‘brocaded’ blue ground in Liao Pao Show (Liao Baoxiu), Huali cai ci: Qianlong yangcai/Stunning Decorative Porcelains from the Ch’ien-lung Reign, Palace Museum, Taipei, 2008, no. 82. With its plain blue ground and four-sided design the present bowl is particularly close to the Kangxi prototypes.

As an avid collector of antiques, the Qianlong Emperor appreciated archaism also in contemporary works. The dragons seen on this bowl are not the ‘official’, seemingly naturalistic, long species, but the highly stylized kui, whose heads consist almost only of an open mouth with upward-bent snout. They are clearly derived from the confronted dragon motifs found in borders of late Shang bronzes (c. twelfth century BC); see, for example, the dragon on a gong illustrated in Wang Tao, Mirroring China’s Past. Emperors, Scholars, and Their Bronzes, The Art Institute of Chicago, New Haven and London, 2018, no. 35 (fig. 2); or two borders with such dragons on a you in Bernhard Karlgren and Jan Wirgin, Chinese Bronzes. The Natanael Wessén Collection, The Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities Monograph Series, vol. 1, Stockholm, 1969, pl. 5.

In the Qianlong period, archaistic kui dragons appear on works of art in many media, for example, on porcelain vases with bronze designs in gilt relief, see Gugong zhencang Kang Yong Qian ciqi tulu/Kangxi, Yongzheng, Qianlong. Qing Porcelain from the Palace Museum Collection, Hong Kong, 1989, p. 394, no. 75; or Fengge gushi. Qianlong nian shi falangcai ci/Story of an Artistic Style. Imperial Porcelain with Painted Enamels of the Qianlong Emperor, Palace Museum, Taipei, 2021, p. 240, fig. 54.

On the present bowl, however, archaism has been combined with another stylistic trend of the period. The soft scrolls that had defined the dragons’ rudimentary bodies in the Bronze Age have here developed into baroque swirls, with the characteristic, abrupt changes of direction in their curves; for a related idea see a diagram for a vessel designed between 1715 and 1735, in a German engraving in the Victoria & Albert Museum, London (fig. 3). The floating blossom motifs issuing foliate scrolls on this bowl are equally remote from the natural flower sprays typical of Chinese design and show a European touch, but can similarly be found already on Kangxi prototypes; see, for example, a bowl in the Musée Guimet with similar floral motifs between orchid medallions, in Xavier Besse, La Chine des porcelaines, Paris, 2004, pl. 46.

The formal dragon design on the present piece was apparently used for only one pair of bowls, as is characteristic of falangcai. The companion piece is preserved in the Musée Guimet, Paris, from the collection of Ernest Grandidier (1833-1912), French industrialist and naturalist, who in 1894 donated a large part of his extensive collection, now in the Musée Guimet, to the Louvre in Paris (fig. 4). The bowl is illustrated in Besse 2004, op.cit., pl. 49; and in Oriental Ceramics. The World’s Great Collections, vol. 7, Tokyo, New York, and San Francisco, 1981, no. 194. 

The Taipei Palace Museum holds one exceptional pair of bowls with a dragon design, datable to 1742, which shows quaint long dragons among clouds, see Liao 2008, op.cit., no. 15. Although this pair is recorded in the Palace Archives as yangcai and published as such by Liao, it bears blue enamel reign marks and therefore must have been enamelled in the palace workshops, a ware we today call falangcai. The present bowl and its pair in Paris appear to be the only other falangcai vessels painted with a dragon motif. Falangcai bowls with a blue ground are rare altogether.

Bowls of this size, with a diameter of c. 16 cm, are in the Palace Archives called ‘large bowls’ and represent the largest listed bowl size. While other bowls are identified as vessels for tea, wine, food or soup, the function of these large bowls does not seem to be recorded; see Liao Baoxiu, ‘Cong dang’an nei pinming kan Qianlong citai falangcai zhu wenti [Some questions of Qianlong porcelain-bodied falangcai viewed from the terms used in the Archives]’, in Gugong Bowuyuan bashi huadan gu taoi guoji xueshu yuantaohui lunwen ji [Collection of papers given at the International Academic Symposium on Ancient Ceramics for the 80^th Anniversary of the Palace Museum], Beijing, 2006, p. 146.

Nakano Chutaro (1862-1939), a former owner of the present bowl, was an oil magnate, who assembled a fine collection of Chinese and Japanese art. He is also known as erstwhile owner of one of Japan’s most celebrated bonsai trees, a white pine with a presumed age of 450 years, which he named Higurashi, ‘to spend the day’, as he felt he could do that, viewing this tree. He was the son of Nakano Kanichi, one of Japan’s leading oil producers, whose Meiji era residence, Senkei-en in Niigata, located within extensive scenic gardens renowned for their autumn colours, now houses the Nakano House Art Museum.

琺瑯異彩綻夔龍

康蕊君

琺瑯彩瓷繪於紫禁帝苑，於一牆之隔經天子寓目，乃御瓷諸品最近聖意之類。琺瑯彩瓷非一般官窰，不事皇家禮儀，純作賞玩之用，盡顯匠心巧藝，藏於乾清宮、養心殿而不入庫房。景德鎮御窰瓷雖以龍紋為尊，然琺瑯彩瓷鮮有繪龍紋者。

康熙一朝，紫禁城內首度燒製琺瑯彩瓷，歐洲藝匠獲邀入宮，此間，西人帶來新出彩料，開闊御窰眼界。雍正曾將西人遣散離宮，而乾隆尊崇康熙，親近皇瑪法猶勝皇阿瑪，故重召歐洲藝匠回宮，以致乾隆初年，風格、理念多東西合璧。東風西漸，龍鳳紋飾等中式圖樣風靡歐洲宮廷，反之，西洋風情亦滲入中國藝術，流行一時。

此盌紋開四面，落於色地，乃循康熙琺瑯彩御瓷之制。起初，景德鎮製瓷施釉，然北京御窰作坊在光滑釉面難畫琺瑯，故改由景德鎮燒胎不施全釉，進京後於素坯上加繪琺瑯。盌外壁多作色地，覆蓋澀胎，再四面等分，飾碩麗花卉，莖葉分明，器內施釉，素潔無紋；可比一盌，同為藍地，帶紅料康熙年款，藏上海博物館，錄汪慶正編，《上海博物館藏康熙瓷圖錄》，香港，1998年，編號94（圖一）。

至雍正朝，釉上加彩燒成之法已爐火純青，未久，琺瑯彩匠便棄用早期紋飾，改繪山水圖景，如作丹青。該朝琺瑯彩多為白地，色地雍正琺瑯彩甚罕。

乾隆琺瑯彩再度改弦易轍，新風格乃復興康熙傳統。康熙盌外壁不留白乃別無他法，乾隆盌外壁不留白則是刻意為之，恰如此盌，色地乃至四面紋飾，皆仿康熙風貌，然器內飾紋，是為創新。乾隆色地多以剔劃作錦上添花，極盡富麗之能事，而此盌色地光素無華，實屬珍罕；比乾隆琺瑯彩盌一對，尺寸略小，於錦紋藍地上作花卉紋飾，錄廖寶秀，《華麗彩瓷：乾隆洋彩》，故宮博物院，台北，2008年，編號82。此盌藍地平實，且四面作飾，尤得康熙神韻。

乾隆汲古藏珍，更寓古於今。此盌所繪龍紋非官家慣用之龍，而擇夔龍樣式，張口仰鼻，風格鮮明。二龍相向，乃溯至商末青銅紋飾，可比一觥之龍紋，錄汪濤，《吉金鑑古：皇室與文人的青銅器收藏》，芝加哥藝術博物館，紐黑文及倫敦，2018年，編號35（圖二）；另比一卣之龍紋，錄高本漢及韋俊，《Chinese Bronzes: The Natanael Wessén Collection》，東亞博物館專著叢編，卷1，斯德哥爾摩，1969年，圖版5。

乾隆時期，各類藝珍均見夔龍，如瓷胎金彩凸夔紋瓶，錄《故宮珍藏康雍乾瓷器圖錄》，香港，1989年，頁394，編號75；另見《風格故事：乾隆年製琺瑯彩瓷》，故宮博物院，台北，2021年，頁240，圖54。

反觀此盌，仿古夔龍結合時新風格。青銅時代，龍紋盤曲蜿蜒，而此盌上，夔龍起伏頓挫，弧線圓柔，帶巴洛克情致；如此巧思可比一器，見倫敦維多利亞與艾伯特博物館藏1715至1735年間德國雕版圖示（圖三）。折枝花朵纏連卷葉，均佈盌身，既屬中式典型，又含西洋韻味，亦有康熙雛本可尋；如一盌，吉美博物館寶蓄，蘭草團花間隙所繪花卉與此相似，錄於 Xavier Besse，《La Chine des porcelaines》，巴黎，2004年，圖版46。

依琺瑯彩瓷之慣例，用此夔龍紋飾之盌僅見一對，另一隻為法國實業家、博物學家Ernest Grandidier（1833-1912）舊藏，現貯吉美博物館，巴黎；1894年，Grandidier慨捐大量藏品予盧浮宮，而後，其所捐贈轉入吉美博物館（圖四）。此盌錄 Besse 前述出處，圖版49，及《東洋陶磁大觀》，卷7，東京、紐約及舊金山，1981年，編號194。

台北故宮藏有一對琺瑯彩龍紋盌，或為1742年造，繪穿雲古龍紋，載廖寶秀前述出處，編號15。廖寶秀依清宮檔案將該對錄為洋彩，然憑藍料年款可知該對由清宮作坊施彩，即今時所稱琺瑯彩。該對之外，此盌及其巴黎同例應成唯一一對琺瑯彩龍紋盌，加之以寶石藍作色地，殊罕備至。

此盌口徑約16公分，清宮檔案稱之為「大盌」，乃所列諸盌最大類。其他各盌供茶、酒、飲食，然此類大盌之用未有詳述；見廖寶秀，〈從檔案內品名看乾隆瓷胎琺瑯彩諸問題〉，《故宮博物院八十華誕古陶瓷國際學術研討會論文集》，北京，2006年，頁146。

日本石油大亨中野忠太郎（1862-1939）雅蓄中國及日本藝術，此盌是其舊藏。日本盆栽名品「日暮」為傳世白松，樹齡約450年，中野亦藏之，曾觀樹度日。其父中野貫一乃日本油王，明治時期居於新潟泉恵園，舊邸現為中野邸美術館，園中秋色聞名遐邇。