The stoneware bottle has a low-slung body, a long narrow neck flaring to an everted mouth with rolled mouth rim. The high, sturdy foot is cut at a slant on the interior and surrounds a deeply recessed base. The thick white-slip coating stopping well short of the foot provides a ground for the swiftly painted dark-brown designs on the main body zone that consist of three images, either floral sprays or birds in flight, with wide linear borders above and below and three further abstract images on the lower body. The style is calligraphic in character with areas of “flying-white” where the hairs separated as the brush swept over the surface. A thick clear glaze with a bright sheen covers the exterior and drips into the mouth. The light grey body has burned a warm buff-color where exposed during firing.
The elegant shape, known as yuhuchunping in Chinese, and traditionally “pear-shaped bottle” in English, appears to have been a well-known form by the Tang dynasty, serving as a container for precious libations, for holy water, one that could be held around the narrow necks as indicated by figures depicted in paintings particularly of Buddhist subjects. Glass vessels or those of precious metal imported from central and western Asia likely provided the models and impetus for the Chinese wares. By the Song dynasty, the shape evolved into one with a simply splayed mouth, and became a standard product at numerous kilns north and south including those at Jingdezhen, at celadon producing sites, and at numerous kilns producing Cizhou plain, painted and brown- and black-glazed stonewares. The ceramics of Korea from the Goryeo dynasty (10th-14th century) and of Japan during the Kamakura period (12th-14th century) also were subject to the influence of this shape. Examples comparable to the present vessel abound, testimony to the commercial success of the attractive bottle, its sleek spartan form supporting effortless, breezy images on the hospitable white ground. The tendency to such calligraphic décor was likely motivated by the shape of the vessel, the severe curvature of the main body zone discouraging careful, intricate pictorial scenes, at least for potters and decorators working at kilns producing Cizhou-type wares for a local clientele.
…
Fig. 1: Cizhou bottle with painted design, Yuan dynasty, late 13th-early 14th century, Shanxi Provincial Museum, after Zhongguo taoci quanji: Yuan (shang), Shanghai, 2000, no. 140, p. 141.
Fig. 2: Large fragment of a Cizhou botle, Yuan dynasty, late 13th-early 14th century. from a tomb in Taiyuan, Shanxi province, after Kaogu, 1955:4, pl. XIV:4.
Details:
