An exceedingly rare copper-red-ground reserve-decorated 'vine' double-gourd bottle, Ming dynasty, 15th century | 明十五世紀　紅釉留白脫胎瓜瓞綿綿葫蘆瓶

A London private collection, 1950s.

Generations of Descendants

Regina Krahl

Gourd bottles are auspicious vessels and are closely associated with Daoism. The bottle gourd, often called double gourd, is a characteristic attribute of Li Tieguai, one of the Eight Immortals, but is also carried by other Daoist masters and serves as a container of magic herbs and medicines. A painting by Yan Hui (active late 13th-early 14th century) in the Chion-ji, Kyoto, depicting Li Tieguai with his gourd, one of the earliest representations of the immortal, is illustrated in Stephen Little, Taoism and the Arts of China, The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, 2000, no. 125, where he explains the gourd as “a symbol of the joining of Heaven and Earth in the adepts’s own body”. Ceramic bottle gourds arrived around the same time, particularly from the celadon kilns of Longquan in Zhejiang and the porcelain manufactories of Jingdezhen in Jiangxi. The idea to depict the gourd among its own fruiting and flowering stems, as if suspended on its vine, may have originated slightly later, in the early fifteenth century. With its long, continuous vines bearing blossoms and smaller gourds, it symbolises generations of descendants.

The present porcelain version of a gourd in a deep copper red, draped with slip-painted vines in contrasting white, is a most ambitious item and appears to be unique. Copper red was always the most challenging colour both for porcelain glazes and for painted decoration under the glaze. For the tone to become strong and designs to remain clear, a precise chemical reaction is required, which depends on the reduction of oxygen in the kiln as well as on kiln temperatures. With too strong reduction it can turn grey, with too feeble reduction green, it can evaporate almost completely, become spotty, or shift beyond its intended borders. Experiments to decorate white porcelain with copper were undertaken in Jingdezhen already in the Yuan dynasty (1271–1368), and continued through most periods, but the technique was properly mastered only twice, in the early fifteenth and the turn of the eighteenth century.

The first attempts in the Yuan dynasty yielded mixed results. Designs painted in copper red tended to be restricted to very simple motifs, so the reverse process was favoured, with designs reserved in white on a copper-red ground. Good examples are a flask decorated with a dragon and two pear-shaped bottles with a hare and a lotus spray, respectively, all in white on red, preserved in the Palace Museum, Beijing, and illustrated in Geng Baochang, ed., Gugong Bowuyuan cang wenwu zhenpin quanji. Qinghua youlihong/The Complete Collection of Treasures of the Palace Museum. Blue and White Porcelain with Underglazed Red, Shanghai, 2000, vol. 1, pls 191-3. The red colour on these Yuan pieces turned out quite strong, but the designs are rather patchy.

In the Hongwu reign (1368–1398), copper red was still used as a glaze and for underglaze painting, see ibid., pls 195–225, only rarely with the design reversed in white on red (pl. 223). Unlike the Yuan trials, those of the Hongwu period resulted mostly in a poor colour, but usually in fairly precise drawings. 

The Yongle period (1403–1424) was probably the period when the Jingdezhen imperial kilns most seriously experimented, when new pigments and new decoration techniques were embraced, and copper red had its heyday. Since under court control, the kilns’ standards of quality were now much higher, large numbers of experimental pieces were rejected, destroyed and buried at the kiln site – even though many seem quite satisfactory – as piles of bright red Yongle sherds discovered at Jingdezhen document (Jingdezhen chutu Mingdai yuyao ciqi [Porcelains from the Ming imperial kilns excavated at Jingdezhen], Beijing, 2009, p. 14). The discarded pieces are testimony to the great variety of techniques involving copper that potters endeavoured, besides its use for plain red glazes. Only few passed the strict quality controls.

Designs incised or impressed under a red glaze or moulded in relief turned out unsatisfactory, since the thick glaze largely obscured the decoration, ibid., pls 018–024. Underglaze-painted or glaze-decorated motifs mostly turned fuzzy, ibid. pls 007 – 015; and Jingdezhen Zhushan chutu Yongle guanyao ciqi [Yongle Imperial porcelain excavated at Zhushan, Jingdezhen], Capital Museum, Beijing, 2007, nos 107–117. Designs reserved in white on red, generally of dragons, were perhaps the most satisfactory, ibid. nos 30, 37, 38; but virtually no successfully completed pieces are preserved, even in the Palace Museums. An exceedingly rare stem bowl in the British Museum is illustrated in Jessica Harrison-Hall, Ming Ceramics in the British Museum, London, 2001, no. 3:13 (fig. 1).

In the Xuande period (1426–1435), copper red was still much in use at Jingdezhen, but success rates were hardly any greater. A small, successfully completed ewer, or sauce-pot, of this type, carved with overall overlapping petals in relief under a red glaze is in the Palace Museum, Taipei, published in Mingdai Xuande guanyao jinghua tezhan tulu/Catalogue of the Special Exhibition of Selected Hsüan-te Imperial Porcelains of the Ming Dynasty, Palace Museum, Taipei, 1998, no. 27; related vessels with relief designs fully covered in red glaze were discarded at the kilns and have been excavated, such as a peach-shaped ewer with flower-shaped cover and another with phoenix-head spout, see Jingdezhen chutu Ming Xuande guanyao ciqi/Xuande Imperial Porcelain Excavated at Jingdezhen, Chang Foundation, Taipei, 1998, nos 40 and 41-1.

Although relief details on the spouts of the ewer in Taipei and the phoenix ewer in Jingdezhen may have been applied in slip, none of the above pieces show exactly the technique used on the present bottle, where the design appears to have been painted on in white slip-relief outlines, covered with a transparent glaze and spared out of the copper-red glaze that was applied over the rest of the vessel and in places overlaps the slip design.

Such slip-relief decoration is not known from other copper-red vessels, but was occasionally used in combination with cobalt blue. It is known from a very small group of blue-glazed vessels of the Yuan dynasty, for example, a spouted bowl in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, illustrated in John Ayers, Far Eastern Ceramics in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 1980, col. pl. 41. It was also used in the Xuande reign. Similarly executed and quite closely comparable in the flow of its drawing is the design on a water dropper of Xuande mark and period in the Palace Museum, Taipei, in the form of a mandarin duck with flowering water weeds in reserved white slip relief clinging to its blue-painted body, see the Palace Museum exhibition, Taipei, 1998, op.cit., no. 4 (fig. 2). A technique similar to that on our bottle was also employed on another group of Xuande-marked porcelains that are painted in slip with fish among water weeds, reserved on a cobalt-blue ground; see, for example, a bowl and a dish in the Palace Museum, Taipei, illustrated ibid., nos 132 and 181 (fig. 3); and a discarded deep bowl excavated from the Xuande waste heaps, shown in the Chang Foundation exhibition, 1998, op.cit., no. 057.

The motif of a bottle gourd enveloped in vines is also known from the Xuande reign, but in blue and white. A fragmentary gourd-shaped water dropper painted with gourd vines in cobalt blue, apparently in relief over an underdrawing of slip, was excavated from the Xuande waste heaps at Jingdezhen, see Chang Foundation, 1998, op.cit., no. F1 (fig. 4); as was a small bird-case accessory shaped as a gourd and painted with vines, no. F10. Two bird feeders of Xuande mark and period have the form of a gourd placed horizontally, also with painted vines; one from the collection of C.P. Lin was included in the exhibition Engaging Past Wisdom. Min Chiu Society at Sixty-Five, Hong Kong Museum of Art, Hong Kong, 2025, vol. I, no. 54; the other in the Shanghai Museum is illustrated in Lu Minghua, Shanghai Bowuguan cangpin yanjiu daxi/Studies of the Shanghai Museum Collections: A Series of Monographs. Mingdai guanyao ciqi [Ming imperial porcelain], Shanghai, 2007, pl. 1-34.

Closely comparable to the present piece in shape, decoration and size, and equally without reign mark, are two blue-and-white bottles attributed to the Xuande reign, one in the British Museum, the other in the Palace Museum, Beijing; for the former see Harrison-Hall, op.cit., no. 4: 18 (fig. 5); for the latter, Fu Yang, ed., Qinghua Ciqi [Blue-and-white porcelain], Beijing, 1957 (unnumbered pl.), and Mayuyama Yasuhiko, Chūgoku bunbutsu kenbun [Information on China’s cultural relics], Tokyo, 1973, pl. 26, which shows the piece on display in the Museum between two other early Ming bottles.

In the Xuande period, reign marks were very common and were perhaps even the rule for imperial porcelains; unmarked vessels of similar date are therefore often attributed either to the Yongle period before, or to the Interregnum period (1436 – 1464) after Xuande, when reign marks were practically not used, but also to even later periods. The British Museum piece has, over the years, been variously dated, but it is instructive to compare it to another unmarked blue-and-white gourd bottle in the Palace Museum, Beijing, of basically the same design, but attributed to the Jiajing period (1522–1566), in Geng Baochang, ed., Gugong Bowuyuan cang gu taoci ziliao xuancui [Selection of ancient ceramic material from the Palace Museum], Beijing, 2005, vol. 1, pl. 146; besides in proportions, it differs particularly in the more elaborate spiral curling of the vine’s tendrils. The same is true for two Qing revival gourd bottles painted with gourd vines in underglaze red, one from the J.T. Tai collection, sold at Sotheby’s Hong Kong, 7th October 2010, lot 2133, the other from the collection of Edward T. Chow, sold in these rooms, 19th May 1981, lot 541.

For the present copper-red piece, a Yongle date is equally conceivable. An Interregnum date is unlikely, since during that period, copper red does not seem to have been in use at Jingdezhen at all. It was employed again in the Chenghua reign (1465–1487), but only rarely, and was then basically restricted to the trusted techniques that had achieved success in the Xuande reign, such as monochrome glazes and red glaze decoration of three fish or three fruits. The Chenghua period is not known for experimentation with copper red. Thereafter, almost no copper-red porcelain was manufactured until the Kangxi period (1662–1722). Besides the shape and design of this unusual gourd, the quality of its rich ‘crushed berry’ glaze and the orange edge of its unglazed base are features that fit well into the earlier part of the fifteenth century, and are not shared by later vessels.

The present bottle gourd is a remarkable vessel since its execution is so accomplished; it is also an intriguing piece since it has no direct counterparts among handed-down or excavated porcelains. It can be understood as a testament to the enterprising spirit and versatility of Chinese potters during probably the greatest period of the Jingdezhen imperial kilns.

來源

倫敦私人收藏，1950年代

子孫之昌

康蕊君

葫蘆瓶者，祥瑞器也，與道家密不可分。葫蘆乃八仙之一鐵拐李持用法器，亦爲諸道師所執，可貯靈草丹藥。京都知恩寺藏顏輝（活躍於十三世紀末至十四世紀初）繪《鐵拐仙人像》，畫中鐵拐李持葫蘆，乃存世最早鐵拐李像之一，錄 Stephen Little，《Taoism and the Arts of China》，芝加哥藝術博物館，芝加哥，2000年，編號125，書中釋葫蘆之義，謂其象徵「道士蘊天地交泰於己身」。陶瓷葫蘆瓶約略同時興起，尤以浙江龍泉青釉窰口及江西景德鎮所產為著。以花果莖蔓繞器、若懸葫蘆於藤上之制可溯至十五世紀初葉。藤蔓綿延，花實相繼，瓜瓞構思寓意子孫昌熾。

本件葫蘆瓶通體施銅紅釉，以化妝土留白作藤蔓瓜瓞，工藝艱鉅，疑爲孤品。無論罩器為釉或釉下為繪，銅紅均是最難駕馭之色。欲使發色濃艷、紋飾清晰，此中化學反應須不失毫厘，全賴窰内還原氣氛與溫度掌控。還原過盛，則色轉灰黯，還原不足，則紅中泛綠，甚或揮發殆盡、斑駁暈散、溢出邊界。早在元代（1271–1368年），景德鎮對銅紅飾白瓷已有探索，之後歷代續有嘗試，然此技純熟，僅十五世紀之初、十八世紀之交兩度而已。

元代初試，成敗參半。因銅紅作繪多限於簡易紋樣，紅地留白之法反成風尚。北京故宮博物院藏有佳例數件，如一龍紋扁壺、一兔紋長頸瓶及一蓮紋長頸瓶，皆紅地留白，錄耿寶昌編，《故宮博物院藏文物珍品全集・青花釉裏紅》，上海，2000年，卷上，圖版191至193。上述諸元代例紅色雖濃，然紋飾頗見斑駁。

洪武年間（1368–1398年），銅紅亦作單色釉及釉下紋飾兩用，見前述出處，圖版195至225，惟紅地留白者甚罕（圖版223）。較之元代，洪武試燒色澤多遜，然紋飾尚屬清晰。

而至永樂（1403–1424年），景德鎮御窰廠潛心鑽研，新彩料、新技藝並重，銅紅之用乃登峰造極。既為官窰，品質則必精益求精，大量試製之器遭淘汰，縱差強人意，亦被毀棄、掩埋於窰址；景德鎮出土永樂紅釉瓷片堆積如山，可為力證（載《景德鎮出土明代御窰瓷器》，北京，2009年，頁14）。考棄置殘器，足見御窰廠陶工所試銅紅技法之繁，遠非單色施釉而已。因審查嚴苛，留用者極稀。

因紅釉稠厚致紋飾不清，釉下刻花、印花或模印淺浮雕等皆不盡人意，見前述出處，圖版018至024。釉下繪飾或施釉紋飾往往模糊，出處同前，圖版007至015，另見《景德鎮珠山出土永樂官窰瓷器》，首都博物館，北京，2007年，編號107至117。紅地留白作龍紋者，成果或最喜人，出處同前，編號30、37、38；然成器完整且存世至今者少之又少，兩岸故宮亦鮮見之。一高足盌稀貴難求，藏大英博物館，錄霍吉淑，《Ming Ceramics in the British Museum》，倫敦，2001年，編號3:13（圖1）。

宣德十載（1426–1435年），景德鎮亦對銅紅大加採用，然成就已難見突破。一小執壺，浮雕花瓣，罩以紅釉，堪稱佳作，原或裝盛醬汁，現藏台北故宮，載《明代宣德官窰菁華特展圖錄》，故宮博物院，台北，1998年，編號27；窰址出土棄件中，有相類淺浮雕紅釉器，如執壺兩件，一作桃形身帶花形蓋，一作鳳首流，詳見《景德鎮出土明宣德官窰瓷器》，鴻禧美術館，台北，1998年，編號40及40-1。

細看上述諸例之流部細節，台北故宮執壺及景德鎮鳳首執壺或以化妝土作飾，然皆不若本件葫蘆瓶之技：以白色化妝土堆出紋飾輪廓，罩透明釉，此外通身施銅紅釉，局部亦見紅釉溢覆於化妝土上。

該化妝土堆飾技法未見其他銅紅釉器採用，然與鈷料偶有並用。少數元代藍釉瓷器採用此法，如維多利亞與艾爾伯特博物館藏一匜，倫敦，錄 John Ayers，《Far Eastern Ceramics in the Victoria and Albert Museum》，倫敦，1980年，彩圖41。宣德朝亦有沿用，如台北故宮一鴛鴦形水滴，宣德年款，藍地上以化妝土堆白作水藻紋，紋飾技藝、畫意皆與本件頗似，見前述台北故宮特展圖錄，台北，1998年，編號4（圖2）。另有宣德年款瓷器用相類技法，以化妝土於鈷藍地上作魚藻紋；可比盌、盤各一例，藏故宮博物院，台北，錄前述出處，編號132、181（圖3）；宣德地層窰業堆積亦出土一盌，展於鴻禧美術館，1998年，出處同前，編號057。

葫蘆瓶身飾藤蔓瓜瓞之制，宣德時期亦有，然為青花。景德鎮宣德朝窰業堆積出土一葫蘆形水滴殘器，於化妝土上堆塑葫蘆藤，以鈷藍罩之，見鴻禧美術館，1998年，出處同前，編號F1（圖4）；另錄一葫蘆形鳥籠配件，亦繪瓜藤，編號F10。再比鳥食器兩件，宣德年款，作橫置葫蘆形，亦繪藤紋：其一為練松柏寳蓄，展於《鑑古識今──敏求精舍六十五周年》，香港藝術館，香港，2025年，卷一，編號54；另一藏上海博物館，錄陸明華，《上海博物館藏品研究大系・明代官窰瓷器》，上海，2007年，圖版1-34。

器形、紋飾、大小皆與本件近似且無款者，可尋青花二例，斷代宣德，分別藏於大英博物館及北京故宮；大英例錄霍吉淑，前述出處，編號4:18（圖5），故宮例載傅揚編，《青花瓷器》，北京，1957年，無編號圖版，及繭山康彦，《中国文物見聞》，東京，1973年，圖版26，此圖版中該瓶展陳於故宮博物院，置於兩件明初瓶器之間。

宣德一朝，年款甚為普遍，幾成御窰瓷器定制，而永樂及空白期瓷器不落年款，故同時期之無款器多斷為前朝永樂，或後續之空白期（1436 – 1464年），甚至更晚。大英所藏之例，其斷代歷年來眾說紛紜，可與北京故宮另一無款青花葫蘆瓶作比，二者形、紋皆似，然後者斷代嘉靖（1522–1566年），錄耿寶昌編，《故宮博物院藏古陶瓷資料選萃》，北京，2005年，卷一，圖版146；除比例有別外，藤蔓卷曲如螺旋，亦見差異。再比清仿葫蘆瓶兩件作例，以釉裏紅飾瓜瓞藤蔓，一件為戴潤齋舊藏，售於香港蘇富比2010年10月7日，編號2133，另一件為仇焱之舊藏，售於香港蘇富比1981年5月19日，編號541。

就本件論，永樂之說可通。空白期之說則不成立，因空白期内景德鎮不曾燒製銅紅釉器。直至成化（1465–1487年），銅紅釉乃得復用，然亦不多見，且僅限宣德已臻成熟之技，如單色釉、三魚紋、三多紋等。以銅紅試新者，實爲成化朝所未聞，此後，銅紅釉器幾乎絕跡，又至康熙（1662–1722年）方才重現。 除形制、紋飾之殊異，本件釉色濃郁，呈「寶石紅」，器底露胎處見火石紅邊，如是種種，皆吻合十五世紀初葉典型特徵，為後世諸瓷所無。

本葫蘆瓶工藝臻善，堪稱絕品，又因傳世、出土皆無同例，尤引愛瓷者心往神馳。景德鎮御窰廠曾風光極盛，窰藝經千錘百鍊乃得幻化無窮，往昔輝煌，於此瓶可見一斑。