Dish with Bird on Fruit Tree Branch (1662–1722): Art, History and Details

Dish with Bird on Fruit Tree Branch (1662–1722) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

Among the greatest achievements of early Qing porcelain are table wares and display objects decorated with polychrome painting like this pair of dishes. Featuring birds perched in peach trees, the dishes are related to the famous birthday set commissioned for the Kangxi emperor’s sixtieth birthday in 1713. These pieces are more inventive than those in the 1713 set, however, since the unframed ornament is allowed to continue unbroken from the outer to inner surfaces and back out again, thus transforming each vessel into a three-dimensional canvas.

Object facts

• Title: Dish with Bird on Fruit Tree Branch
• Date: 1662–1722
• Culture: China, Jiangxi province, Jingdezhen kilns, Qing dynasty (1644–1911), Kangxi mark and reign (1662–1722)
• Type: Ceramic
• Technique: Porcelain with famille-verte overglaze enamel decoration
• Dimensions: Diameter: 20.5 cm (8 1/16 in.)
• Collection: China - Qing Dynasty
• Department: Chinese Art
• Accession number: 1964.213.2

A detail from the museum

By the early eighteenth century, the imperial kilns at Jingdezhen were producing exceptionally fine pieces on a staggering scale.

Collection credit

Severance and Greta Millikin Collection

Further reading listed by the museum

• Catalogue of the Severance and Greta Millikin Collection. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1990.
• Cunningham, Michael R., Stanislaw J. Czuma, Anne E. Wardwell, and J. Keith Wilson. Masterworks of Asian Art. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1998.
• Lin, Yi-Hsin 林逸欣. "Cleveland Museum of Art Presents 'A Myriad of Flowers and Bird in Chinese Art'" 克里夫蘭藝術博物館「中國藝術中的花鳥集錦」展覽. Art & Collection 典藏．古美術 402 (March 2026).

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.