The thick-walled, heavy-bodied, stoneware dish is of deep form with a slightly lobed well, a barbed out-turned rim, and decoration produced in cobalt beneath a lustrous glaze. The slightly convex interior is painted with layered mountains in the center flanked by leafy trees below two smaller tri-peaked hills with bamboo, the three groups as if independent islands in a white sea. A frilled double-petal border frames the scene with ruyi-infilled petal panels contained in larger petal lappets extending to the rim, which is decorated with cloud motifs on a blue ground. The petal lappet décor is repeated on the exterior, with a pair of concentric blue lines painted above the foot. The foot thick, slanted inward and rounded on the rim. The unglazed concave base was wiped with brown wash applied in a swirling pattern against the greyish-white stoneware body.
The so-called “island dishes” include those illustrated here (figs. 1-6) and are considered rare among the known Annamese or Vietnamese underglaze-blue decorated wares of the 15th-16th century.1 Only three were among the over two-thousand Hoi An wares at the Butterfields Fall 2000 auction. Numerous lesser wares—round boxes covered with flat lids, for example—were decorated with versions of the “island” design reduced to fit the more limited spaces available. The scene on the present dish is rarest of all given its innovative composition in which an island with its looming range dominates the center of the watery ground with two islands fading in the distance.
When the Annamese potters in the later 14th and 15th century responded in kind to the achievement of potters to their north in China, a parallel life of blue-and-white was born. The close association between China and Annam, however, became more distant as a local or indigenous spirit and creativity spurred the local potters into an independent future. The skewed petals, the “shaded” mountains, the jumbled ruyi forms, the unnaturalistic size relationships between mountains and foliage, and the odd number of lobes and barbs—thirteen—are symptoms of what would evolve into Annamese or Vietnamese wares that could never be mistaken for anything but. The ceramic industry received a great boost through export to neighboring countries– Indonesia, Japan and the Middle East– thanks to restrictions on exports imposed by the early Ming government and the death of Zheng He, who led six maritime expeditions on behalf of the Chinese emperors, before his death in 1433.
1. See John Stevenson, et.al. , Vietnamese Ceramics, A Separate Tradition, Chicago, 1997, p. 15.
Fig. 1: Underglaze-blue painted island dish, late 15th-early 16th century, formerly the Menke collection, after John Stevenson, et.al. , Vietnamese Ceramics, A Separate Tradition, Chicago, 1997, pl. 244, p. 308.
Fig. 2: Underglaze-blue painted island dish, late 15th-early 16th century A.D., Philadelphia Museum of Art, after http://www.philamuseum.org/collections/permanent/92000.html?mulR=160244853|4
Fig. 3: Underglaze-blue painted island dish, late 15th-early 16th century A.D., from the Hoi An cargo, after Treasures from the Hoi An Hoard, Important Vietnamese Ceramics from a Late 15th/Early 16th Century Cargo, Oct. 11-13, 2000, Butterfields, San Francisco and Los Angeles, pl. 25, p. 15.
Fig. 4: Underglaze-blue painted island dish, late 15th-early 16th century A.D., from the Hoi An cargo, after Treasures from the Hoi An Hoard, Important Vietnamese Ceramics from a Late 15th/Early 16th Century Cargo, Oct. 11-13, 2000, Butterfields, San Francisco and Los Angeles, pl. 26, p. 15.
Fig. 5: Underglaze-blue painted island dish, late 15th-early 16th century AD., from the Hoi An cargo, after Treasures from the Hoi An Hoard, Important Vietnamese Ceramics from a Late 15th/Early 16th Century Cargo, Oct. 11-13, 2000, Butterfields, San Francisco and Los Angeles, pl. 38, p. 20.