Covered wine pot or teapot

This vessel with its domed cover together form a slightly depressed globe; the pot has a curving spout and earshaped handle with a small projection below. Two little boys amid floral scrolls are reserved in white against a blue ground on the pot, and the floral motif on the lid is reserved as well. The flat recessed base is glazed; the unglazed foot rim shows a fine, smooth paste. An artemisia leaf within two circles has been painted in underglaze blue on the base. The handle has been repaired. The reserved decoration seen on this work occurs much less frequently than blue designs on a white ground;(1) it continues a decorative tradition in Chinese blue-andwhite wares that reaches back to the fourteenth century. It has not been determined whether porcelains like this piece and the number of similar pouring vessels in the Robert Lehman Collection were intended to hold wine or tea. Comparable pots have been catalogued as either “wine pots” or “teapots” in various publications. They might well have served different functions, depending on whether they were used in China or exported to the West. A large number of blue-and-white porcelain globular pots were among the salvaged cargo of the “Hatcher Junk.”(2) Globular porcelain pots also were among the cargo salvaged from a Dutch merchant vessel, the Geldermalsen, that sank in 1752 in the South China Sea.(3) The blue-and-white Chinese porcelains in the Robert Lehman Collection are representative of the extraordinary amount of blue-and-white ware that was sent from China to appreciative European buyers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. For example, some 190,000 pieces of “new” Chinese porcelain were sold at the auctions of the material from the “Hatcher Junk” and the Geldermalsen.(4) Another shipwreck, that of the Ca Mau, a Chinese vessel that sank in the South China Sea about 1725, yielded some 130,000 Chinese porcelains in good or reasonable condition; 76,000 of these porcelains were auctioned in January 2007.(5)

Catalogue entry from Suzanne G. Valenstein. The Robert Collection. Decorative Arts, Volume XV. Wolfram Koeppe, et al. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in association with Princeton University Press, 2012, pp. 314-315.

NOTES:
1. Two blue-and-white globular teapots with reserved decoration were among the salvaged cargo of a vessel — generally called the “Asian Junk” or the “Hatcher Junk” — that sank in the South China Sea, probably between 1643 and 1646. Sale, Christie’s, Amsterdam, 12 – 13 June 1984, lots 699 (pl. p. 60), 694 (pl. p. 83).
2. Sale, Christie’s, Amsterdam, 14 March 1984, lots 54 – 65, 68, pl. p. 9; sale, Christie’s, Amsterdam, 12 – 13 June 1984, pls. pp. 57, 60, 83; Sheaf, Colin, and Richard S. Kilburn. The Hatcher Porcelain Cargoes: The Complete Record. Oxford, 1988, pls. 80, 92.
3. Sale, Christie’s, Amsterdam, 28 April – 2 May 1986, lots 2041 – 2222, pls. pp. 85, 89, 93; Sheaf and Kilburn, pls. 185, 186.
4. Sheaf and Kilburn, p. 7. Note that not every piece of porcelain in the two ships’ cargoes was salvaged; the number of pieces given here is for those objects that had been recovered from the wrecks and were sold at auction.
5. Sale, Sotheby’s, Amsterdam, 29 – 31 January 2007.

William H. Whitridge, Baltimore; Whitridge sale, Parke-Bernet Galleries, New York, 16-18 November 1939, lot 520, ill. Acquired by Robert Lehman from the Whitridge sale.