Blue and white dragon bowl, Ming dynasty, Wanli

A blue and white bowl freely painted with a dragon and a phoenix chasing a pearl, with a carp in the waves in the centre of the well, the base marked with a double circle. Wanli period.

Dragon and phoenix together are the imperial pairing — emperor and empress — and by the Wanli reign the motif had spread well beyond court use. The painting here is loose and quick, which is characteristic: Wanli production was enormous and the brushwork shows it.

Wanli cobalt is greyer and more diffuse than the saturated blue of the Kangxi period that follows, and that difference is one of the more reliable dating tools in blue and white. It is worth holding this bowl next to a Kangxi piece to see it.

Wanli blue and white in context

The Wanli reign (1573–1620) was the last great period of Ming production at Jingdezhen and the first age of mass export. Blue-and-white dishes shipped to Europe in Portuguese carracks became known as kraak, from the Dutch name for the ship, and the VOC ship Witte Leeuw, sunk off Saint Helena in 1613, carried a cargo of Wanli porcelain that the Rijksmuseum still holds. The dragon, painted here in underglaze cobalt, is the imperial motif of the period.

Cobalt is the dating tool. The British Museum describes second-half-sixteenth-century imperial cobalt as “a distinctive strong, dark and even tone”; the greyer, more diffuse blue seen on much Wanli ware is characteristic of the reign and quite different from the sapphire blue of Kangxi a century later. And marks should be read with care: the V&A records that Chenghua and Xuande marks “were commonly used on Wanli period porcelains”, so a Wanli piece is dated by its cobalt, potting and foot, not by what is written on it.

Read more: Ming porcelain and blue and white.