Lot 103. A rare sancai-glazed 'phoenix' ewer, Tang Dynasty (618-907). Estimate 35,000 — 45,000 GBP. Photo: Sotheby's
the finely potted body of elegant ovoid form, supported on a splayed foot, the sides moulded in relief with cartouches bordered with flowers, centred with a prancing phoenix to one side and a hunter on horseback to the other, below a long curved handle terminating in the head of a ferocious phoenix, surmounted by a short neck and an oval straight rim, covered with amber, cream, blue and green glazes; 33 cm, 13 in.
Notes: Similar examples to the present, with the imported cobalt-blue pigment combined with amber glazes, include one from the Ernest S. Heller and Stanley Herzman collections, illustrated in Suzanne Valenstein, The Herzman Collection of Chinese Ceramics, Hong Kong, 1992, pl. 6, sold in these rooms, 6th November 1981, lot 161, and now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; another in the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, illustrated in He Li, Chinese Ceramics, 1996, pl. 166; and a third ewer, from the Szeyuan Tang collection, sold in these rooms, 21st September 2005, lot 16.
Margaret Medley in ‘Metalwork and Chinese Ceramics’, PDF Monograph Series, no. 2, p. 4, discusses the far-reaching effect on Chinese culture of the opening of diplomatic relations between the Chinese Emperor Yangdi of the Sui Dynasty and the Sassanian Persians in the late 6th century, and the remarkable results on ceramics. She illustrates a phoenix ewer of this pattern, pl. 3b, together with other Chinese pottery bird-headed ewers, pl. 3a, 2a and 1b, and a Sassanian silver ewer, pl. 1a. Ewers of this type appear to have been slung from the hump of laden camels, as seen with the animal excavated from a tomb at Guanlin, illustrated in Luoyang Tang sancai [Tang sancai ware from Luoyang], Beijing, 1980, pl. 80.
Sotheby's. Important Chinese Art, Londron, 09 nov. 2016, 11:30 AM