Fluted Dish with Imperial Inscription
The shape of this dish imitates a chrysanthemum blossom. The Qianlong Emperor was a devotee of lacquer wares and often composed poems praising the virtues of the finest examples. These poems were then incised into the surface and filled with gold.
The varnishers of Wu (Suzhou) may be compared with ingenious arithemeticians.
The lacquer wares they copied from ancient pieces are probably better than the originals.
They make molds without using wood or tin.
They finished the wares without carving and polishing.
The color of this plate is like an Immortal drunken, with red face.
This is that in everything one should study the ancients.
I have tried to express my ideas in verse,
But I am afraid that I have already said too much.
-The year Jiawu of Qianlong (1774), inscribed by the Emperor.
S. Yanagi;
Purchased from S. Yanagi by The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO, 1976.
Roger Ward and Patricia J. Fidler, eds., The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art: A Handbook of the Collection (New York: Hudson Hills Press, in association with Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 1993): 341.
Deborah Emont Scott, ed., The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art: A Handbook of the Collection, 7th ed. (Kansas City, MO: Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 2008): 377, fig. 290.
Jason Steuber, “Qing Dynasty emperors Kangxi and Qianlong”, in Original Intentions: Essays on Production, Reproduction, and Interpretation in the Arts of China, edited by Nick Pearce and Jason Steuber (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2012), 172 (repro.).
