Thinly potted with rounded sides resting on a slightly recessed base, the exterior of the sides delicately enameled in pale underglazed blue and characteristic enamels of soft tone with a continuous scenes of a black-tailed cockerel looking in the direction of a hen surrounded by chicks, all amidst garden rocks with outcrops of vibrant camellias and lilies in delicate enamels of yellow, red, blue, and green, set in between line borders in underglazed blue, the base with a six character reign mark. The cup is thinly potted out of fine white paste while the transparent glaze is more apparent on the base. Since the reign of Wanli, the chicken cup had been regarded as the paradigms of the finest Chenghua porcelain. According to Gu Yingtai in Bowu Yaolan, there was a record that Emperor Wanli once owned a pair of such chicken cups adorned with roosters, hens and chicks, the emperor set a precedent and purchased them a hundred thousand dollars. Due to its great prevalence, the design of the chicken cup was reproduced in subsequent reigns as epitomizes by the present lot. The Emperor of Yongzheng would send samples of the originals from the Palace collection so that reproductions could be manufactured with their own reign mark. The size and the composition of the present lot resembles the qualities of a sophisticated composition of a Chenghua piece with the exception of the utilization of black on the tail of the cockerel. According to according to the Jijiu pian, the origin of such delicate composition may have been derived from the spring scene of cockerel with their tails tilted up as they embrace the warm spring and also from paintings of a hen in search of food with the company of her chicks, as observed from the National Palace museum’s collection of Qing paintings. Chicken cups are coveted by connoisseurs and Museums worldwide and are known to exist in numerous public collections such as in the Beijing Palace Museum, the Taipei National Palace Museum, the Baur Collection in Geneva, the Metropolitan Museum in New York, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Percival David foundation in London among other distinguished private collections. Compare with two pairs of Chicken cups dated to the same reign as the present lot, a finished Yongzheng doucai pair contrasts with an unfinished pair where the entire design is finely delineated in a soft underglazed blue, illustrated in Qing Imperial Porcelain, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, 1995, pl.60 and another Yongzheng creation illustrated in Selected Treasures of Chinese Art. Min Chiu Society, pl.165, pp.360-361. Courtesy of the National Palace Museum, Taipei. See also another doucai style chicken cup dated to later reign, illustrated in The Museum of East Asian Art Bath England. Inaugural Exhibition, Vol.1, pl. 189, p.240 and another illustrated in Ho Wing Meng, The Emperor’s lost treasure. Remnants of unrecorded. Remnants of unrecorded Chenghua porcelain, 2004, pl. 2 and 3. Compare also with another Chicken cup illustrated in Imperial porcelain of the Chenghua reign excavated from Zhushan. Jingdezhen, pl. C55, pp.198-199. See also a doucai chicken cup exhibiting a similar decorative design sold at Sotheby’s Hong Kong, 1 November 1974, lot 256.
D: 8 cm