Small celadon glazed crackle bowl, Yuan dynasty

A small bowl under a crackle-suffused green glaze that thins to white around the rim. Yuan dynasty.

That thinning is worth looking at closely. Where the body turns sharply at the rim the glaze runs away from the edge and the white body shows through — a behaviour of thick celadon glazes that is very hard to fake convincingly, and one of the first things to check on any celadon offered as early.

Yuan is a short dynasty and the surviving material is scarce; Yuan celadons are frequently catalogued as either Song or Ming by people who have not handled many.

Yuan celadon in context

The Yuan dynasty (1279–1368) is the century between the Song kilns and the Ming imperial factory, and it is when Longquan celadon went industrial. The British Museum records dragon kilns at Longquan exceeding 100 metres by the late thirteenth century, firing tens of thousands of pieces for an export trade that reached the Islamic world by sea. The Metropolitan Museum identifies moulded relief decoration as an innovation of the Longquan kilns in this period, though plain, thickly glazed forms continued alongside it.

Crackle on a celadon of this kind should be read carefully. On Guan and Ge wares the crazing was deliberate and is the ware’s defining feature; on other celadons it is a property of the glaze. Either way it is not a hairline, which is a crack through the body and a different matter entirely. This is the only piece of Yuan date in the collection.

Read more: Song ceramics and crackle versus hairline.