Famille rose porcelain paperweight with landscape

Famille rose porcelain paperweight with landscape
Famille rose porcelain paperweight with landscape

People’s Republic of China, early to mid 20th century

Length: 8 1/4 inches, 21 cm
Width: 2 inches, 5 cm
Height: 1 3/8 inches, 3.5 cm

A famille rose porcelain paperweight of brick form. The top surface is enamelled with buildings in a landscape setting, with jagged mountains, various kinds of trees and floating clouds filling up the scene. The upper left corner has a fourteen-character inscription. There are eight further smaller characters at the end of the poem, reading “ding hai nian chun zuo yu zhu shan (made at Zhushan in the Spring of Dinghai year). The ends of the paperweight are carved in openwork with a double-coin pattern. The paperweight is covered overall in a thin transparent glaze, leaving only the base unglazed and revealing the porcelain body of slightly buff colour with firing marks.

The inscription on this charming porcelain paperweight comes from a famous poem Seeing Meng Haoran Off from the Yellow Crane Tower (Huanherou song Meng Haoran zhi Guanglin) written by Li Bai (701 – 762). The whole poem is composed of twenty-eight characters in four lines, and the inscription written on this paperweight are the third and fourth lines of the poem. The translation of the whole poem is: At the Yellow Crane Tower in the west my old friend says farewell; in the mist the flowers of spring he goes down to Yangzhou; lone sail disappears down the edge of the azure sky; all I see is the Yangtze river rolling toward the horizon. The landscape setting decorated on this piece echoes the content of the poem.

琺瑯彩山水樓閣圖瓷鎮
民國 二十世紀早 – 中期 長:21公分 寬:5 公分 高:3.5 公分

長方柱型瓷質紙鎮,以琺瑯彩繪山水樓閣圖,煙波飄渺,蒼穹高遠。左上角墨書唐朝詩
人李白《黃鶴樓送孟浩然之廣陵》七絕詩中後兩句「孤帆遠影碧空盡,惟見長江天際
流。」句尾提「丁亥年春作於珠山」。瓷鎮通體罩釉,兩側鏤空雕毬路紋。紙鎮為常見
文房用具之一,本品詩畫兼具,雅俗共賞。