ROGER KEVERNE WINTER 2002 Ceramics - Item 63

63 A pair of extremely fine porcelain ladies with candleholders Qianlong period Height: 16 in, 40.6 cm the elegant young women, holding candleholders in the form of lingzhi fungus, stand in mirror-image poses. Each figure is superbly modelled with her hair, left in the biscuit, incised and swept upwards in a double bun fixed with two hairpins and flowers, and leaving three black tresses falling over her shoulders. They wear knee-length tunics, delicately painted in the famille-rose palette with scattered flowers and insects, tied with belts and short aprons enamelled in rouge-de-fer with gilt decoration, over long rouge-de-fer and gilt robes; the hems are decorated in gilt on a black ground. The ladies’ particularly attractive and delicately modelled faces bear smiling expressions.

These figures are remarkable for their superb modelling and fine condition. A closely related pair of flat-backed figures, almost certainly by the same hand, is illustrated in Godden, Oriental Export Market Porcelain and its influence on European wares, no. 167,p. 242. For further pairs, see Gulland, Chinese Porcelain, Vol. II, nos. 714 and 715; Howard, The Choice of The Private Trader: The Private Market in Chinese Export Porcelain illustrated from the Hodroff collection, no. 307, p. 258; Sargent, The Copeland Collection: Chinese and Japanese Ceramic Figures, no. 61, pp. 133–5; and Williamson, The Book of Famille Rose,pl. LIX. Two related, single examples are illustrated in Howard and Ayers, China for the West: Chinese Porcelain and other Decorative Arts for Export illustrated from the Mottahedeh Collection, no. 642, p. 613, and no. 644, pp. 614–15.