Skip to Main Content

Provenance

Richard Bennett, Northampton, England; sold 1914 to (Gorer, London); (Dreicer and Co., New York, agent of Gorer, London); sold 1914 to Peter A. B. Widener, Lynnewood Hall, Elkins Park, Pennsylvania; inheritance from Estate of Peter A. B. Widener by gift through power of appointment of Joseph E. Widener, Elkins Park, Pennsylvania; gift 1942 to NGA.

Technical Summary

The globular body of this vase is set on a tall, spreading pedestal-like foot and has a flaring, trumpeted neck. These three segments were luted together, and the joints can be felt. The unusual base is recessed in two steps from the wedge-cut foot-ring and is covered with a pale blue-gray crackled glaze. The foot-ring is unglazed. The same glaze is visible in the upper part of the vessel's interior, but the lower portion is covered with a colorless glaze. The enamel covering the underlying blue-gray glaze on the exterior is a fresh grass green. A few dark spots are scattered on the surface. Both the base glaze and the enamel end in fairly neat lines at the foot and at the mouth. There are some thin, dark, ribbonlike areas at the foot where the underlying glaze apparently did not completely cover or pulled away from the clay body. There is no glaze at the top of the mouth rim, which has a smooth finish, a characteristic not seen elsewhere in the National Gallery collection. The crackle on the neck is larger and somewhat darker than on the rest of the vessel.

Bibliography

1911
Gorer 1911, 71, no. 352.
1942
Works of Art from the Widener Collection. Foreword by David Finley and John Walker. National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1942: 22.
1998
Bower, Virginia, Josephine Hadley Knapp, Stephen Little, and Robert Wilson Torchia. Decorative Arts, Part II: Far Eastern Ceramics and Paintings; Persian and Indian Rugs and Carpets. The Collections of the National Gallery of Art Systematic Catalogue. Washington, D.C., 1998: 120-121, color repro.

Related Content

  • Sort by:
  • Results layout:
Show  results per page
The image compare list is empty.