Riding the wind of rebirth

Chapter 1627: Three Qing Dynasties

An Siyuan should have understood the term "Wei and Jin style", so the old man and the young man ate this meal in a somewhat deliberate manner. They both wanted to behave like Xie An, "I can't let you see the nervousness and excitement in my heart", but the sound of the knife and fork touching the plate and the slightly hurried eating speed, like the teeth of Xie An's clogs that broke when he passed by the door, would inevitably destroy such a pretentious person.

However, both of them tacitly agreed not to bring this up, and they quickly finished this "pretentious meal" before entering into their own collection process.

With four Ming Dynasty cups for An Siyuan to play with, the old man no longer looked down on the cups from the three Qing dynasties.

However, just because the old man doesn't like it doesn't mean Zhou Zhi is not interested.

Zhouzhi has collected many fine porcelains from three generations, but as a top-level handicraft made from a small piece of wood, Zhouzhi only owns two sets of Yongzheng Dynasty Doucai Sanduo horseshoe cups obtained from Master Cixiang of Fawang Temple.

One of the two sets of cups is a pure imitation of Chenghua's pattern, with longevity peaches, Buddha's hands and pomegranates on the cups; although the other set still has the pattern of "Made in the Chenghua Period of the Ming Dynasty" written on the bottom, the pattern is actually the creation of the Yongzheng craftsmen, and the patterns on the cups are persimmons, loquats and lychees.

The craftsmen were very conscious and avoided the Chenghua purple, which is the most difficult to imitate.

Zhou Zhi liked those two sets of cups very much and often took them out to play with them.

However, those two sets of cups were of a lower grade than the one in front of Zhou Zhi now.

There are three cups with the inscription "Made in the Kangxi Period of the Qing Dynasty" on the bottom. The cup bodies are all light and thin, as white as paper, and the body is so white that only the glaze can be seen but not the body. One side is painted with exquisite colors, depicting a flower of the month, with rocks, plants, birds and insects; the other side is inscribed with a famous Tang Dynasty poem in blue and white, and a blue and white square seal with the word "Shang" is stamped, and the bottom circle foot is engraved with a double-line six-character reign mark.

This carefully designed, exquisite and charming cup combines poetry, calligraphy, painting and seal carving into one, and is full of the artistic atmosphere of literati. From the aesthetic point of view and the degree of refinement alone, the level of craftsmanship has actually far exceeded that of Chenghua Wucai.

In the 19th year of the reign of Emperor Kangxi, Emperor Kangxi ordered the restoration of the Imperial Kiln Factory in Jingdezhen and began to develop various porcelains of new styles. In the 25th year, the Jingde Imperial Kiln Factory fired a set of twelve cups for the court. Each cup was decorated with a seasonal flower and inscribed with a corresponding poem. This was the first time in the history of porcelain that "poetry, calligraphy, painting, and seal" were added to the same piece of porcelain at the same time, and the porcelain was so delicate and compact. This is Kangxi's famous "Twelve Months Flower God Cup".

The three Kangxi cups should be three of the twelve flower god cups fired in the official kilns of the Kangxi Dynasty. One is the "Orchid" flower god cup, with a poem on the back that reads "The light fragrance of the wide palace is emitted, and the high platform is far away with the sound of singing". One is the "Peony" flower god cup, with a poem on the back that reads "The morning beauty is far away with golden palm dew, and the evening fragrance is deep and attracts the wind of the jade hall". The third is the "Lotus" flower god cup, with a poem on the back that reads "The root is jade in the mud, and the heart is a pearl under the dew".

All three cups are in the shape of inverted bells, so their official name should be Kangxi Doucai Twelve Flower Gods Bell Cups.

These three cups have completely broken away from the aesthetic constraints of the Ming Dynasty Doucai small cups. From the perspective of composition style, they are very sparse and fresh, with a lot of white space. There are no borders or brocade decorations around the theme flower patterns, which are significantly influenced by Yun Nantian, a famous flower and bird painter in the early Qing Dynasty. In terms of painting techniques, traditional five-color painting uses flat painting, using color materials to evenly spread and apply, which results in the simple phenomenon of "no side-to-side leaf".

However, on the Kangxi December Flower Cup, obvious rendering techniques began to appear, and attempts were made to manipulate the light and dark levels of the pattern.

The color of the flower head is darker, and then gradually fades from the flower head to the center. The perspective method is also clearly used in the interweaving of branches, flowers, leaves, and rocks. From a visual effect, it is more real and natural.

This method of handling color tones can be said to be influenced by Western oil painting techniques. Europeans began to arrive in large numbers since the middle and late Ming Dynasty, and most of those who were able to penetrate into inland China were missionaries. They brought with them various types of art products that were very different from traditional Chinese culture, and had an increasingly profound impact on Chinese ceramic art.

Kangxi had a strong desire for knowledge. He invited many Western missionaries to explain Western learning to him, encouraged Western painting creation and introduced Western painters. For a time, he pioneered the exchange and integration of Eastern and Western art, and this style was also continued in the production of porcelain.

However, the traditional aesthetic of porcelain has not been lost. The use of underglaze blue and white in this period no longer serves as the "bones and muscles" of the Ming Dynasty blue and white doucai. Instead, after the blue and white craftsmanship is able to "divide ink into five colors", it becomes the blurred background setting for the colorful floral patterns on the foreground of the cup, and becomes the shadows of stones, bamboo and trees, creating a "background blur" technique commonly used in photography to more clearly highlight the subject of the painting, which is truly wonderful.

The value of the Flower God Cup lies in two points: first, the Flower God Cup combines poetry, calligraphy, painting and seal carving in one, with high artistic attainments and embodies the feelings of literati; second, there are twelve Flower God Cups in a set, and it is quite difficult to put together a complete set.

But up to now, people have not been enthusiastic about it. For example, the auction price of each of the three cups is only about 200,000 Hong Kong dollars, which cannot be compared with the four cups that An Siyuan is admiring.

The main reason is that the number of copies in existence is quite large. As far as Zhou Zhi knows, there are several complete sets in the Palace Museum in Beijing.

The funniest thing is that from the 1950s to the 1980s, in order to enhance the quality of the collections of local museums, the Palace Museum transferred a batch of cultural relics to local museums. The main one among them was the Flower God Cup, which was convenient for transportation and fully reflected the quality and style.

It was for this reason that the Sichuan Provincial Museum obtained a complete set of the December flower poem cups. In addition, the Hubei Provincial Museum, Tianjin Museum, Hebei Provincial Museum, Yunnan Provincial Museum and Bianliang Museum, etc., all received complete or partial sets of colorful December flower cups.

In addition to the above-mentioned places, the Nanjing Museum also has a collection of a very special set of blue and white Twelve-Month Flower Cups. Initially, experts believed that it was "leaky color", that is, it was originally intended to be colored and fired a second time, but for some unknown reason the subsequent links were missed. It was only recently overturned by a new argument that from the perspective of the integrity of the composition, it was a set that was originally intended to be fired into blue and white porcelain. It is estimated that Emperor Kangxi ordered the Imperial Kiln to specially fire it in order to satisfy his own aesthetic taste.

The number of scattered Flower God Cups among the people is impossible to count, but it is almost impossible for the people to collect a complete set on their own. Basically, those that appear at auctions are single or in pairs.

But the next pair of small cups from the Yongzheng period are different. Although they were made later than those from the Kangxi period, their value far exceeds that of the three flower god cups.