A fine and very rare famille-verte and incised 'birthday' dish, apocryphal Chenghua mark, Qing dynasty, Kangxi period | 清康熙 五彩喜鵲祝壽暗刻龍紋盤 《大明成化年製》仿款

The present dish is brilliantly enamelled with a magpie perching on a leafy branch of plump apricots, all against an incised ground rendered with a pair of dragons encircling a central shou medallion. Decorated with auspicious symbols, this dish is related to a group of very finely potted and painted dishes known as ‘birthday’ dishes, which are believed to have been made for the Kangxi Emperor’s (r. 1662-1722) sixtieth birthday in 1713 and are today represented in world-famous collections. They are often of the finest quality porcelain, extremely white, thin, and very translucent, and appear faultless, as discussed in Margaret Medley, The Chinese Potter, Oxford, 1976, pp. 243-244. These dishes were probably made under the supervision of Lang Tingji, one of the most celebrated supervisors of the imperial kilns in Chinese history, see Peter Y.K. Lam, ‘Lang Tingji (1663-1715) and the porcelain of the late Kangxi period’, Transactions of the Oriental Ceramic Society, vol. 68, 2003-4, p. 40.

'Birthday' dishes are known in very small numbers but of different sizes and with a variety of designs, depicting either different scenes of the Daoist immortal Magu offering birthday celebrations, a household legend in China, or nature scenes of birds or insects. A few ‘birthday’ dishes are decorated with the motif of a bird perching on a fruiting branch, like the present lot, but they usually differ remarkably in the bird's posture and the type of fruit.

Compare a few Kangxi-marked examples with a comparable magpie design, but without the incised decoration in the background: a smaller dish in the British Museum Collection, no. 1936,0413.8; another dish, also smaller in size, in the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities, Stockholm, illustrated in Oriental Ceramics. The World’s Great Collections, vol. 8, Tokyo, 1982, col. pl. 60; and a larger pair, sold in these rooms, 6th April 2016, lot 3601.