Rare 17th-century Ming Transitional bowl with landscape compartments

An octagonal bowl of the Transitional period — the decades either side of the Ming collapse in 1644, when imperial control of the Jingdezhen kilns lapsed and painters worked with a freedom that never quite returned. The decoration runs in landscape compartments around the faceted body, handled like a handscroll wrapped around a bowl rather than a repeating pattern.

Transitional wares are among the most confidently painted Chinese porcelains, and they are still comparatively undervalued against the reign-marked imperial pieces either side of them. The faceting is worth handling: each panel had to be luted and trued by hand.

The Transitional period in context

“Transitional” is the name given to the porcelain made in the decades around the fall of the Ming in 1644 — roughly the 1620s to the 1680s — when imperial patronage of Jingdezhen collapsed and the kilns turned to the domestic scholar market and to export. The Metropolitan Museum uses the term as a catalogue label; it is convention rather than a fixed bracket, and we treat it as such. Freed from court orders, painters of the period drew landscapes, figures and narrative scenes from woodblock-printed books with unusual freedom, and the best Transitional blue and white is prized for exactly that.

Landscape compartments — panels of scenery separated by borders — are a characteristic device of the period, and this bowl has the best-structured description in the catalogue for a reason: it has seventeen photographs including base and rim, and its faults are itemised. On the old site it carried no tags at all and sat in no collection; it is the piece the migration plan singled out as invisible. It is not invisible now.

Read more: Ming porcelain and blue and white.