Pair of Vases (1736–95): Art, History and Details

Pair of Vases (1736–95) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

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

This spectacular vase, one of a pair in the collection, depicts flowering and fruiting peach trees to convey an auspicious message of affluence and long life. Developments in enamel technology led to new possibilities in polychrome decoration of Qing imperial porcelains. Pinks appeared, lending their name to the new palette of overglaze colors (famille rose), and the addition of opaque white allowed painters to vary the value of pigments, enhancing the painterly quality of porcelain decoration.

Object facts

• Title: Pair of Vases
• Date: 1736–95
• Culture: China, Jiangxi province, Jingdezhen, Qing dynasty (1644-1911), Qianlong mark and period (1736-1795)
• Type: Ceramic
• Technique: porcelain with famille rose overglaze enamel decoration
• Dimensions: Overall: 51.4 cm (20 1/4 in.)
• Collection: China - Qing Dynasty
• Department: Chinese Art
• Accession number: 1944.184

Collection credit

Elisabeth Severance Prentiss Collection

Further reading listed by the museum

• Catalogue of the Elisabeth Severance Prentiss collection : bequest of Elisabeth Severance Prentiss, 1944. [Cleveland]: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1944.
• Hollis, Howard. “Chinese and Korean Ceramics: Japanese Lacquer.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 31, no. 6 (June 1944): 103–106.

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.