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Lot 257
A BRONZE RITUAL VESSEL 'DOU'
Estimated Value:
4.000 € - 6.000 €
Result:
6.475 € incl. Premium and VAT
Description:
China, Eastern Zhou/ early Spring and Autumn periodH. 19,8 cm
On a high, curved base sits a shallowly domed bowl with two opposing ring-shaped handles turned in like ropes. As is characteristic of many of the Dou type food offering vessels from that time, this one also has a cup-like, round handle on its lid, which was to be used upside down as an additional, albeit considerably lower, offering vessel could serve as a stand. The decoration on both the bowl and the lid consists of lenticular knobs arranged evenly and densely in ring-shaped registers on an otherwise smooth background. The conically upward tapering foot has remained perfectly smooth and is decorated only with a geometric pattern. Bronze cast in two parts, extensive areas with strong reddish, also malachite and azurite incrustations, brownish, as well as in places on the underside and foot black shiny patina, in addition over wide areas of the surface extraordinarily hard encrustations.
Important Austrian private collection, according to records from an old New York private collection, collected in the 1920s, acquired through E. & J. Frankel, New York in the 1990s
Publ.: Zeileis 'From Shang to Qing - Three and a Half Millennia of Chinese Bronze', 1999, No. 90, pp. 260-261.
Cf. Jenny So, 'Eastern Zhou Ritual Bronzes from the Arthur M.Sackler Collections', Washington 1995, on pp.184/5, no. 25.
Few small old rep., partly corroded