A pair of famille verte four-sided green Fahua-type vases. Ming

The vases are four-sided with a square mouth and a flat square unglazed base. On the sides of the neck are semi-circular handles emerging from the open jaws of a lion-like head. The decorative motifs are outlined in raised slip and then infilled in with yellow, aubergine, and green enamels and transparent glaze on an emerald green ground in fahua-style. The surfaces are divided into bands of decoration with ruyi, lingzhi and flowers.

Provenance

Purchased from Léon Wannieck, 1930
From an important French private collection formed between 1924 and 1941

Related works

A very closed four-sided vase, from the collection of the British Museum is illustrated by Jessica Harrison-Hall in Ming Ceramics in the British Museum, 2001, British Museum Press, p. 410/411,, nos 13:3.

Notice

The shapes of these vases suggests that they could have been modelled after a bronze altar vase. Two blue and white four-sided porcelain vases of this square form were excavated from the tomb of Mrs Cai (1405-1441), wife of the scholar official Wang Xi (1405-1452), buried with her husband and his other two wives at Pingwu county, Sichuan province, in 1464.

Green fahua is rarer than the more popular blue variety but the glaze is of the same lead-alkali type.  This yellow, green and aubergine palette is already current at Jingdezhen in the Chenghua period (1465-1488), as evidenced by a rare Chenghua mark and period duck-shaped incense burner, recovered from the late Chenghua stratum at the imperial kiln site at Zhushan, Jingdezhen.