Painted in underglaze blue with a continuous genre scene depicting children at play in a fenced garden, all above a band of stiff leaves, and below a freize of interlocking triangular scroll panels, the shoulders decorated with butterflies in typical Transitional trailing flowers, the short neck with a collar of spiky leaves.
Literature
The form of this jar is typical of a number of both marked and unmarked pieces of the Wanli period (1577 - 1619). The slightly angular shoulders and the tendency to cylindricality contrast with the smoother curving profile of the late Shunzhi and Kangxi jars. The triangular motif forming the band running round the shoulder first appears in the late sixteenth century a reduced or bisected form of a diaper pattern seen on a stem cup, illustrated by Pope, Chinese Porcelains from the Ardebil Shrine, pl.109 no. 29, 484. A similar border is to be seen on an Iranian dish of the Safavid period, late sixteenth or early seventeenth century is illustrated in Carswell, Blue and White Porcelains and their Impact on the Western World, p.140 no.80.
