Famille rose dragon bottle vase, Qianlong mark but 19th century

An ovoid vase rising to a long neck and slightly everted mouth, painted in famille rose enamels with three sinuous chi-dragons among lingzhi fungus, set against a gilded brocade ground. The neck carries a further dragon; the shoulder a band of feather-like tendrils on blue. The base is inscribed with a six-character Qianlong mark in iron red.

The mark is not of the period. A nineteenth-century vase under a Qianlong mark is the ordinary configuration, and this is a good example of why the mark cannot settle the question: the painting is genuinely accomplished, the gilding generous, and none of that makes it eighteenth century. The body, the enamel surface and the foot do the dating.

Chinese: 清 乾隆款 粉彩錦地描金龍紋膽瓶.

Qianlong marks on nineteenth-century porcelain

This vase carries a six-character Qianlong mark in iron red and was made in the nineteenth century. That is stated in the title because it is the single most important fact about it, and because it is normal. The Metropolitan Museum describes apocryphal reign marks as “widespread” and notes that they were often used “as a kind of salute to ceramics of an earlier time” — homage rather than deception. Qianlong (1736–95) was the reign most admired by later potters, and the seal-script mark that predominated through it was reproduced for generations.

Famille rose, the palette here, was the achievement of the Yongzheng reign: a pink from colloidal gold and an opaque white that let painters shade for the first time. A well-painted nineteenth-century famille rose dragon vase is a fine object in its own right — the Met’s own words are that copies of Chinese ceramics “can be very fine, valuable works of art in their own right”. This one came from a private English collection, bought in Singapore in the 1980s; the dealer’s label is still on the base.

Read more: mark and period, or apocryphal? and famille rose.