Description:
Chinese export porcelain punch bowl decorated in the Mandarin palette in purple, pink, green, blue, black, brown, orange, yellow, white, and gilding with hunting scenes. The exterior sides have two scenes of riding hunters with whips in hand and dogs running through field and trees, with a walled city in the background; the interior has an elaborate rim border and a round scene in the center well where one man in orange shoots a musket while two man watch. Chinese export wares decorated with hunting scenes, which were made from about 1750 onwards, have a variety of scenes and borders; however, many hunt scenes copied on Chinese porcelain were based on a series of four engravings produced after paintings by James Seymour (1702-1752). These prints include “Making a Cast at a Fault,” “Going to Cover,” “Digging for the Fox,” and “The Death of the Fox.” “Making a cast” refers to sending the hounds out to search for the fox. If they are unsuccessful (a “fault”), the hunters send their hounds out again to locate the fox; hounds “going to cover” chase the fox into the woods after they have flushed it out. After the fox has been located, dogs, usually corgis, dig to uncover the fox, and finally the hounds kill the prey once it is unearthed. A punch bowl illustrated in David Howard and John Ayres’ "China for the West" faithfully copies these print images; most other bowls are loosely based on these design sources. Several engravers produced these Seymour-based prints such as: "Going out in the Morning" (with the gazebo of a big house in the background), "Brushing into Cover," and "In full Chase" by Pierre Charles Canot (1710-1777); a set of four engravings of this series by J. Roberts completed and published abut 1780 by Robert Wilkinson of London; "The Death of the Fox" by Anthony Walker (1726-1765) after a painting by Seymour; a 1753 print, "Beating and Trailing for Horse," by T. Burford (c.1710-c.1754), which was republished in 1787; and prints published by Robert Sayer (1725-1794), a London print dealer and map maker working from the late 1740s to 1794. Hunting designs were very popular in the English market (many of which were ordered for use after the hunt) and were also bought for the American markets, which shared identical scenes and similar motifs often with translations varying depending on the liberties taken by the Chinese painters. A hunt bowl was brought back on the first American ship, "Empress of China" that entered the China trade in 1784, which was ordered by the ship's carpenter, John Morgan (1750-1785) of Groton, Connecticut. Morgan died en route from Canton, but his executor, Thomas Blake, gunner and steward of the ship, delivered his effects to his father; the bowl is now in the collection of the Mystic Seaport Museum.
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