The sides of the deep, wide-mouthed bowl rise from a high, square-cut foot, the inner wall surrounding the recessed base slanted outward from the base. A high-domed lid with a flat button-like knop fits snugly over the bowl. The exterior of the vessel was applied with two coats of glaze, a thinner first coat and thicker second application that drapes around the lower part of the bowl and drips irregularly over the foot. A distinctive rust-colored glaze encircles the vessel beneath the mouth rim and streaks into the black glaze below. The foot and base are unglazed revealing a buff-colored surface of the grey-colored coarse stoneware body. The interior is glazed with a single coat of the dark glaze. A black-glaze coats the upper surface of the lid, exhibiting a rust color on the top of the knop and partially circling it, while the underside, where the concentric grooves or spirals from turning on the wheel are strongly present, is also coated with the same glaze save for the flattened rim of the lid which is left unglazed. The glaze is bright with spit outs, blemishes, and extensive signs of use.
Although we refer to the glaze as black, in truth, it is, as usual in these wares, a deep blackish-brown or brownish-black. Such distinctively dark-glazed wares were produced throughout China, the present piece at a kiln in the north where a number of provinces were home to such kilns, ranging from the center of the Cizhou world in south Hebei to Henan to Shaanxi, Shanxi and Shandong, as well as within the Ningxia Autonomous Region. Hebei province has been suggested as the place of origin for a very similar piece from the Mr. and Mrs. Yeung Wing Tak Collection (fig. 1). Excavated material from the major Cizhou kiln complex at Guantai in Hebei includes bowls and covers similar to the Yeung and present vessel (figs. 2-3).
Deep bowls with high vertical sides are not uncommon among the black and brown glazed wares of the north, nor is the application of iron-rust-colored glaze along with the basic monochrome dark glaze on such wares. While the use of a brush to paint images which fired to a rust color over the darker background was used extensively on these wares, here we have the rust subtly shading the black, similar to a bowl in the Sackler Museum at Harvard University (fig. 4). To suggest how the color effects were achieved Mowry writes, “A dip of the rim into a solution rich in iron compounds resulted in the russet lip…”. We can suggest a similar process to achieve the glaze color of the present bowl.
1.See Robert Mowry in Hare’s Fur, Tortoiseshell, and Partridge Feathers: Chinese Brown- and Black- glazed Ceramics, 400-1400, Cambridge, 1996, p. 157.
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Fig. 1: Black-glazed covered bowl, Northern Song period, 12th century, after Black Porcelain from the Mr. & Mrs. Yeung Wing Tak Collection, Guangzhou, 1997, no. 41, p. 87.
Fig. 2: Black-glazed bowl, Northern Song-Jin period, 12th-13th century, excavated from Guantai, Hebei province, after Guantai Cizhou yaozhi, Beijing, 1997, pl. XLIII: 3.
Fig. 3: Black-glazed bowl lids, Northern Song-Jin period, 12th-13th century, excavated from Guantai, Hebei province, after Guantai Cizhou yaozhi, Beijing, 1997, pl. XLVI.
Fig. 4: Bowl with black and rust-colored glaze, Jin dynasty, from a Northern Song tomb, after Zhang Bai, Zhongguo qutu ciqi quanji: 12 (Henan), Beijing, 2008, no. 146, p. 146.
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