Bottle: C.11-1926

Maker(s)

Pottery: Unknown

Entities

• Bottle

Categories

• Porcelain

Description

Porcelain, thrown, painted in copper-red and glazed. This bottle has a long cylindrical neck, a wide pear-shaped body, and a low footring. Except for the lowest part of the body, the vessel is entirely painted in a dark red copper-oxide with a faint honeycomb design in a slightly darker tone and covered overall by a pale bluish-white glaze. Coarse sand from the kiln support adheres to the base. The mouth has been repaired with gold lacquer.

Notes

History note: Unknown before donor

Legal notes

Given by Dr W.M. Tapp

Acquisition and important dates

Method of acquisition: Given (1926-07-11) by Tapp, W. M., Dr

Dating

19th Century
Choson Dynasty (1392 - 1910)
Circa 1800 - 1900

Note

This bottle is an extremely rare piece of Choson porcelain, in fact the only example of this form to be covered entirely in underglaze copper-red. Towards the end of the nineteenth century the neck of such bottles became long and cylindrical. Judging by its shape, colour and its sandy base, the bottle looks like the product of a provincial kiln. For a nineteenth-century water dropper in the Seoul National Museum, also decorated overall in this shade of red, see Sekai Toji Zenshu, vol.19, 1980, pl.209; and for a hexagonal bottle with the same distinctive proportions, but painted in underglaze-red and blue, ibid. pl.203.