Antiquarian at Greenwich

A Large Swatow Slip-Decorated Blue-Ground Bowl Ming Dynasty (1368-1644)

Porcelain dish with 'Swatow-type' blue glaze and white slip decoration. This heavily potted dish has rounded sides, a broad flat upturned rim and a tapering foot. It is decorated inside and out first with a white, then with a grey-blue glaze. Slip-painted stylized chrysanthemums fill the centre, small chrysanthemums comprised of tiny dots together with lotus sprays ornament the well, and the rim shows a border of chrysanthemum flowers. The exterior is plain. The foot ring is very gritty and the base is covered with patches of cream, blue and green glaze.

A Swatow type bowl from the Zhangzhou region of China.   Produced during the Ming dynasty for export to other regions of Asia.  Circa 1600.  Now mounted on custom designed/fitted stand. 

Such dishes were commonly exported in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, primarily to countries in Southeast Asia and to Japan. For example, an almost identical dish, collected in Indonesia, is in the Princessehof Museum, Leeuwarden, Netherlands. Shards of this type of dish have been recovered from the ruins of Ichijo-in of Kofuku-ji, Nara-shi, Japan, and from the ruins at Naito-cho, Tokyo, now in the Shinjuku Historical Museum, Tokyo. Examples in public collections are too numerous to list. An identical example is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Similar designs were also painted in slip on to a white ground and on to a toffee-coloured ground. An example of each is in the Seikado Bunko Art Museum, Tokyo, together with the more common white on blue design.

A very similar dish is in the British Museum (see J. Harrison-Hall, Ming Ceramics, London, 2001, p. 347, no. 11:187); and a slightly smaller dish (38.1 cm.) is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, illustrated in Oriental Ceramics, The World's Great Collections, Tokyo, 1977, vol. 11, fig. 100.

Other similar examples-

https://www.christies.com/en/lot/lot-5048118

https://www.christies.com/en/lot/lot-5310669

https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/A_Franks-745

https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/50029