Wednesday, 14 September 2016

A Guangdong Stonewar Jar



This jar is part of a three-piece lot from my antique runner/dealer. He got this from the hinterlands of Infanta, another province north of mine.


This was the smallest of the three and I love the table-top quality of the piece. What's important is that it should be free of any restorations and the piece must be intact.  The glaze has degraded to the point that only the lugs and the rim has some specks of light olive-green glaze (more like ochre brown to me).  This must be due to the abrasive and acidic nature of the soil in which it was buried.

The ceramic itself looks like it was fired from a Guangdong kiln in southern China probably during the Song or Yuan dynasty.  It has similar characteristics with other brownware or stoneware pieces attributed to Southern Song.  Although I saw a couple of pieces in Cynthia Valdez's book which attributed them to Vietnam, I feel that the firing, the color of the glaze and the design still points to China.


Although not as desired by collectors as a Song Celadon ceramic, the rustic look makes it a stellar piece in anyone's living room or office.

There's a very similar jar over at the Freer & Sackler Galleries (Smithsonian) which pinpoints such wares to Guangdong province during the Song dynasty.



Jar with four horizontal lugs

  • Stoneware with iron glaze
  • 18.4 x 16 cm
  • Quanzhou ware
  • 12th-14th century, Southern Song or Yuan dynasty
  • Origin: Quanzhou kilns, Quanzhou, Fujian province, China
  • Gift of Osborne and Gratia Hauge, and Victor and Takako Hauge
  • s2005.39

No comments:

Post a Comment