Tea Bowl

About the Artist

With lustrous dark glazes that they colored primarily with iron oxides, potters of the Southern Song Dynasty in China (1127–1279) achieved unprecedented refinement in stoneware bowls, jugs, and other utilitarian shapes. Among Song kilns, the ones located at Jizhou in Jiangxi province (in Southeast China) were the most technically creative potteries during this period. Jizhou factories introduced and pioneered new techniques of decoration that resulted in so-called tortoiseshell glazes, and also in papercut, glaze-resist, and naturalistic leaf designs. In some cases, the innovative mixture of cream-colored wood or bamboo ash with slip (liquid clay) was used to paint bird, insect, and plant designs over the rich brown glaze. Contemporary Song kilns elsewhere, at Jian, specialized instead in the production of dark-glazed tea bowls without painted decoration, producing works enlivened with naturally occurring streaks of the popular, so-called hair’s fur effect.

About the Artwork

The glaze effects and painted decorations on this bowl from Song China make it an unusually rich example among related Jizhou bowls of the period. Two diametrically posed stylized phoenixes emblazon the bowl’s interior, their wings spread in flight, their segmented long tails flowing gracefully. A stylized, symmetrical blossom enlivens the floor, while two opposed schematized clouds (or butterflies?) appear between the mythic birds. At Jizhou, the key-fret pattern below the inner rim of the bowl rarely appears in combination with such phoenix and flower imagery. It is usual for the dark brown exterior walls of Jizhou bowls featuring such interior motifs to be left unadorned, but in this piece the decorator introduced a final note of visual splendor—a tortoiseshell pattern of mottled, buff-colored spots, which is distinctive to Jizhou wares.  

Such decorative treatments may carry symbolic meaning. For instance, traditionally believed to appear in times of peace and prosperity, the phoenix of early Chinese lore is an auspicious emblem. Even the conical shape and deep brown palette of Jizhou bowls are culturally meaningful. They fit perfectly in the upper hands, and the dark surfaces visually intensified the milky froth of the white tea (brewed from prepared young tea leaves) favored during the Song period.