bowl
- Museum number
- Franks.482.+
- Description
-
Porcelain bowl with underglaze blue, overglaze red and 'kinrande' decoration. This bowl has rounded sides and a raised 'mantou' centre and stands on a foot ring. It is decorated in underglaze blue inside in the centre with a single flower with formally arranged leaves in a double ring and with a patterned border of crosses and hatching around the rim. Outside it is covered with an iron-red monochrome overglaze and with traces of 'kinrande' lotus scroll with large blooms and feathery, scrolling leaves. The foot is also decorated with a band of gold. The base is marked in underglaze blue with four characters which read 'Wan fu you tong' [May ten thousand blessings gather together].
- Production date
- 1540-1590 (circa)
- Dimensions
-
Diameter: 10 centimetres
-
Height: 5.50 centimetres
- $Inscriptions
-
- Curator's comments
- Harrison-Hall 2001:
A similar bowl also with gold 'kinrande' decoration but on a blue ground is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. This bowl (reg. no. 1879.79.2-1122) is particularly interesting as it has German mounts datable to 1590-1610, indicating that it came to Europe before 1590. Shards from a bowl of this type have been excavated at Fostat, Cairo, in Egypt, confirming that this style of porcelain bowl was also sent to Africa in the sixteenth century. Other shards of 'kinrande'-decorated porcelain have been found in remote Spanish colonial outposts in Peru and New Mexico dating to the late sixteenth century. Spanish galleons carried gilded porcelain from Manila to Acapulco in Mexico in 1573.
- Location
- Not on display
- Acquisition notes
- The Asian ceramics donated by Sir Augustus Wollaston Franks were recorded in a sequence on index cards (known as the ‘Franks Index Cards’), held in the Dept of Asia.
- Department
- Asia
- Registration number
- Franks.482.+
