Qing Dynasty Brown-Glazed Chinese Dragon Jar

Across the eastern seas the brown-glazed storage jar was the shipping barrel of its day, and the largest of them, carried port to port through Martaban in Burma, lent the whole glazed-stoneware family its old Western name. This is one of the smaller southern Chinese cousins, a dragon jar, its dragons worked in applied relief chasing a pearl around the shoulder under a thin iron glaze that pools dark in the hollows and runs out above a bare, gritty foot.

It was sold to us as seventeenth century. Studied closely it reads most defensibly as eighteenth to nineteenth century, though these folk jars barely changed for generations and are notoriously hard to date, so we hold the century lightly and let the object speak. What is not in doubt is real age: the surface is worn, encrusted and so thirsty that a wax finish vanishes into it. Unmarked, untested, and none the worse for either, an old, used, handsome working jar. Offered within Australia.

Specifications

• Southern Chinese (Guangdong) brown-glazed stoneware; small dragon-jar form
• Part of the broad brown-glazed storage-jar tradition whose large trade jars the West called Martaban; this is not one of those big shipping jars
• Most defensibly 18th to 19th century (Qing), possibly earlier; sold to us as 17th century, age untested and not independently verified
• Maker unknown, unmarked
• Wheel-thrown reddish, gritty stoneware with a flat, unglazed knife-cut base
• Applied, incised dragons chasing a pearl around the shoulder with floret bosses; small shoulder loop lugs
• Thin streaky iron-brown to olive ash glaze, pooling dark, with iridescence and old lime encrustation, stopping above a bare foot
• Approx 26.5 cm high, 21.5 cm wide; weighs 2.35 kg
• Honest age: pitting, kiln orange-peel, mineral encrustation, glaze loss and rim chips; a genuinely old, porous surface