The Metropolitan Museum of Art - Vase with Peaches and Pomegranates

Art Object

Peony Pavilion

Presented November 30, 2012

Tan Dun, director

With the aim of animating Metropolitan Museum galleries in new ways, Met Museum Presents offers one of five performances of the sixteenth-century Kunqu opera masterpiece The Peony Pavilion, in a seventy-minute version developed and directed by celebrated composer Tan Dun with choreography by Huang Doudou, one of China's most prominent dancers, in the Met's Astor Court, the courtyard modeled on a seventeenth-century garden.

The performance is organized in conjunction with the exhibition Chinese Gardens: Palace Pavilions, Scholars' Studios, Rustic Retreats, on view August 18, 2012–January 6, 2013, which explores the rich interactions between pictorial and garden arts in China across more than one thousand years, featuring more than seventy paintings and contemporary photographs as well as ceramics, carved bamboo, lacquerware, metalwork, and textiles drawn from the Museum's collections.

The Peony Pavilion is one of the most important works of classical Chinese opera. A sweeping love story with subplots involving feudalism, the work in its original form consisted of fifty-five acts that take more than twenty hours to perform. This version is directed by Zhang Jun, one of China's most respected Kunqu performers, and remains faithful to the core plot focusing on the love story between the heroine and hero—Du Liniang and Liu Mengmei—and the Peony Pavilion where their love began.

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Vase with Peaches and Pomegranates

Period:: Qing dynasty (1644–1911), Qianlong mark and period (1736–95)
Date:: 18th century
Culture:: China
Medium:: Porcelain painted with colored enamels over transparent glaze (Jingdezhen ware)
Dimensions:: H. 20 in. (50.8 cm); Diam. 16 in. (40.6 cm); Diam. of rim 4 1/2 in. (11.4 cm); Diam. of foot 7 in. (17.8 cm)
Classification:: Ceramics
Credit Line:: Mr. and Mrs. Isaac D. Fletcher Collection, Bequest of Isaac D. Fletcher, 1917
Accession Number:: 17.120.194

This artwork is currently on display in Gallery 202

Description

The delicate pink in the painting illustrates the development of new colors in the early part of the eighteenth century. Opaque white derived from a lead arsenite, and pale pink tinted with bits of gold were added to the palette and combined with existing colors to create a range of hues.
Provenance

Mr. and Mrs. Isaac D. Fletcher , New York (until his d. 1917)
See also
What
Ceramics (29,329)

Clay (23,630)

Vessels (21,925)

Porcelain (11,377)

Vases (8,894)

Painting (5,230)

Glaze (5,161)

Enamels (3,253)
Where
Asia (68,122)

China (17,349)
When
A.D. 1600-1800 (67,116)
In the Museum
Asian Art (35,187)
Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History
Longevity in Chinese Art

China, 1600–1800 A.D.
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