Looks sugary and new to my inexperienced eyes, so I believe this is a modern fake. 

If you look at the whole package, doesn't it look too good to be true? That's supposedly a $1million+ bowl if genuine. If you are selling a house worth 1 million dollar, would you accept a $12,000 offer?

Please note that the bowl is unmarked and therefore it wouldn't be worth a million dollar. I would guesstimate the estimate set by one of the majors to be around a tenth of the estimates of the marked examples sold by them on an average. Additionally they'll take 40 percent of the actual sale price meaning that the owner would probably get much less than $100,000 if I've calculated correctly using my head only. And any regional auction house would probably set the estimate even lower.

@avatar  I'm sure you are right about the unmarked version would be less, but do you have an unmarked comp to compare it with? I suppose that brings up the question of whether a bowl of this type was ever left unmarked? And if one was left unmarked does that imply that there is something inferior about it? And if so what is the inferiority? 

I don't like the way the decoration doesn't observe the boundaries.  You can see it in the upper inner border around the rim and towards the base on the outside.  It looks sloppy.

I'd rather look at your jade; Corey, will you show us that?  It sounds interesting.  I know nothing about any of what you were talking about in your first post but would like to know more.

I agree with Julia, the decoration looks crowded and doesn’t have the elegance of the Alain Truong piece. The Christies document is a joke as it refers only to an auction catalogue, not to a specific item. Together with some stickers that could easily be faked or taken from somewhere else and the notorious wooden box... By the way, is this the seller with the wooden boxes and the professional display whose items you sometimes show? I would be cautious about his items. 

Hello, good morning! I just had my morning coffee and am trying to wake up. But first @ johnshoe.

If you read the catalogue notes for the examples sold by Sotheby's you'll see that at least one unmarked bowl of this design is known. In the notes for the bowl sold at Sotheby's in december 2017 it is stated that: "The present design appears to be specific to the Xuande period, although one apparently unmarked bowl of this design was included in the exhibition Mingdai chunian ciqi tezhan mulu/Catalogue of a Special Exhibition of Early Ming Period Porcelain, National Palace Museum, Taipei, 1982, cat. no. 20."

And in the notes for the sale for the bowl in April 2015 it says that: "a fourth bowl in Taiwan, probably unmarked and predating the Xuande examples, was included in the exhibition Mingdai chunian ciqi tezhan mulu/Catalogue of a Special Exhibition of Early Ming Period Porcelain, Taipei, 1982, cat. no. 20." meaning that the same unmarked bowl from the exhibition in 1982 might actually be a Yongle period example.

Additionally there are copies with apocryphally Xuande marks from the late Ming dynasty and the early Qing dynasty as you can also read in the lot notes from Sotheby's but I don't think the bowl in focus is such a thing.

 @ Julie. I'm not sure if I understand what you mean with "the way the decoration doesn't observe the boundaries." But I think the inner border (the two double lines with flowers in between compares well with inner border of the bowl sold at Sotheby's in April 2015. The way the lines looks sort of "washed out" and the way the flowers touches double lines in some places. More difficult to say with the decoration towards the base since no good close-up is available but I don't think it looks sloppy, more like it's sort of washed out.

The jade item seems extremely interesting (mainly because of its material) and could possibly be considered important and would be something the scholars would be very interested in as it might have an significant academic value. Unfortunately I don't know if it's authentic or not, only that it appear to be very promising. But it will take a longer post to explain why so I'll have to get back to it later. Hope you don't mind.

  @ Shinigami The print of the sale at Christie's only tells us that an exhibition of Ming Blue-and-White porcelain was actually held by the Oriental Ceramic Society in 1946 (as the sticker at the base refers to). So that catalogue would probably be the first to check if one wants to be sure the provenance is true and the bowl thus likely authentic or not. Unfortunately I don't have the catalogue in my home and I don't know if it would be possible to find it at the library.

I don't know who the seller with the wooden boxes is. I show items from many different sellers and sometimes they have wood boxes with them. Chinese antiques often comes with Japanese wood boxes. That goes for authentic pieces, older copies as well as modern fakes.

I don't find the photographs to be professional in a suspect way. Any high school kid with a computer, a photo-editing program and a bit of experience could probably make similar professional looking photographs.

The place where the pictures are copied there are many individual sellers and also some that run several different profiles. There are many fakes there, especially with the Chinese stuff, but 100% there is also authentic stuff available.

Now I hope all of this helps and wish everybody a good day. I'll go down for another coffee ...

I just posted a good video in the Movies section ("Conversations about ceramics in the Freer Gallery of Art"). In part 2 they show an original bowl of this kind.

Chris

@avatar @johnshoe &springmeier @Julia @shinigami @chris71 

Hi Cory and all - 

This bowl is a modern fake, produced fairly recently ...

It is copying a well known early 15thC type, most of which have the  six-character XD mark, although some very rare examples, as noted above, are not marked and these are thought to date to either very late Yongle/very early Xuande ...

The overall painting style on this piece however is very wrong, with  details of individual elements, and indeed whole motifs, drawn incorrectly - as is the cabolt application within such ...

The lable stating provenance to the 1946 OCS Ming Blue and White exhibition is false - there was no example of this type exhibited - I have the catalogue ...

The John Sparks lable also contains errors with the word spacing, so is also incorrect ...

As above, copies produced during the Kangxi period with Xuande marks are also know - but the painting style on these are markedly different ...

So not Xuande - and very far from such ...

Stuart 

Thanks to Chris for the video. And thanks to Stuart for joining in. I found an example of the 1946 catalogue for sale and was just about to write the seller to ask if the bowl is mentioned in it. https://www.ebay.com/itm/Ming-Blue-And-White-Porcelain-Oriental-Ceramic-Society-1946-/133477079959 And I also found several examples of the Mingdai chunian ciqi tezhan mulu/Catalogue of a Special Exhibition of Early Ming Period Porcelain, National Palace Museum, Taipei, 1982, cat. no. 20. for sale but I'm not sure if the bowl is permanently at the museum or was borrowed from somewhere else for the exhibition only. https://www.abebooks.fr/Catalogue-Special-Exhibition-Early-Ming-Period/21856034429/bd

Posted by: @avatar

 

The jade item seems extremely interesting (mainly because of its material) and could possibly be considered important and would be something the scholars would be very interested in as it might have an significant academic value. Unfortunately I don't know if it's authentic or not, only that it appear to be very promising. But it will take a longer post to explain why so I'll have to get back to it later. Hope you don't mind.

Not at all, Corey, but maybe Mark could help? He knows such a lot about jade.