Song Dynasty
The vessel rising from a short foot, with shallow rounded sides and an everted rim, fluidly carved to the interior with two trailing, leafy lotus stems, the glaze of greyish celadon hue.
18.7cm (7 3/8in) diam.
Footnotes
宋 青釉纏枝蓮紋盌
Provenance: Nicholas de la Mare Thompson (1928-2010), collection no.58 (label)
Acquired from R & G McPherson Antiques, London, December 2016 (collector's notes)
Published and Illustrated: M. White, Eating at the Whites' House: Ceramics from the Mary and Peter White collection, vol. 3, n.p., 2022, p.35
Nicholas de la Mare Thompson (1928–2010) was a distinguished collector and long-standing committee member of the Oriental Ceramic Society. Grandson of the poet and author Walter de la Mare, Thompson spent his professional life in publishing, where he combined intellectual independence with a sharp editorial instinct. His interest in Chinese ceramics was grounded in empirical observation and a personal aesthetic sensibility, particularly favouring early monochromes of the Song dynasty. He collected intuitively, often living with a piece before deciding if it belonged in his collection, and frequently consulted his wife Caroline, whose eye he trusted implicitly. He later extended his passion to early books on Chinese art, tracing the development of Western scholarship and collecting.