Famille rose dragon bowl, Guangxu mark and period

A small bowl with a flared body, painted with two iron-red beasts chasing sacred pearls among ruyi clouds, between a key-fret band at the rim and stylised waves at the stepped base. Guangxu mark, and of the period.

Guangxu (1875–1908) is the last substantial reign of the Qing, and its imperial-quality wares are consistently undervalued because collectors reach past them for the eighteenth century. A piece with a Guangxu mark that is genuinely Guangxu is an honest object at an honest price — and worth more, to anyone who cares about what they own, than a nineteenth-century pot wearing a Qianlong mark.

Guangxu iron red in context

The dragons on this bowl are painted in iron red — the Chinese fanhong, an overglaze enamel derived from iron oxide and fired at a lower temperature in a second firing, so that it sits on the glaze surface and reads slightly granular under a lamp. It was used on Chinese porcelain from the Ming onward and became one of the standard palettes of the nineteenth-century imperial kilns, above all for dragon designs, where the red dragon on a white ground is a type in its own right.

The Guangxu reign (1875–1908) came late in the dynasty, after the imperial kilns had been burned by Taiping forces in 1855 and, in the Met’s careful words, it is not certain they were ever rebuilt. The Met is blunt that most late Qing porcelain is “crockery” — and equally clear that “a thin strain of much better porcelains” runs through the period. A Guangxu mark of the period on a well-painted dragon bowl belongs to that better strain, and its six-character mark is the starting point rather than the conclusion: the enamel, the drawing of the dragons and the foot have to agree with the mark, and on this bowl they do.

Read more: Qing porcelain, reign marks and iron red.