A PAIR OF CLAIR-DE-LUNE GLAZED SAUCER DISHES MARKS AND PERIOD OF YONGZHENG | "清雍正 天藍釉盤一對 《大清雍正年製》款

Bluett & Sons, London (label on one of the pair).

Ralph M. Chait Galleries, Inc., New York, 20th August 1997.

Bluett & Sons，倫敦（其一底部標籤）

Ralph M. Chait Galleries Inc.，紐約，1997年8月20日

Exuding understated elegance characteristic of the Yongzheng period, the current pair of dishes is covered in a delicate pale blue clair-de-lune glaze inspired by Song dynasty ru and celadon ware. Known in the West by the nineteenth-century French connoisseurs’ term clair-de-lune (‘moon light’), and in China as tianlan (‘sky blue’), it was one of the most successful monochrome glazes created in Jingdezhen during the Kangxi reign and reserved exclusively for imperial porcelains, remaining popular throughout the Qing dynasty.

A pair of closely related dishes from the Zhuyuetang Collection was included in the exhibition A Millennium of Monochromes from the Great Tang to the High Qing. The Baur and Zhuyuetang Collections, Baur Foundation, Geneva, 2018, cat. no. 88; a dish in the Nanjing Museum is published in The Official Kiln Porcelain of the Chinese Qing Dynasty, Shanghai, 2003, p. 208; and another pair from the collection of Sir Percival David and now in the British Museum, London, included in Illustrated Catalogue of Ming and Qing Monochrome Wares in the Percival David Foundation of Chinese Art, London, 1989, no. B560-1.