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This bowl is 997g in weight, 23cm in diameter and 6cm in height. I'm curious to see what others think. There is no signature or stamp. I date it to early minguo, but possibly even late qing. Looking for someone more well versed in chinese cloisonne to share their knowledge. And thank you!

In my opinion, your cloisonne brush washer is best dated to the early 20th century. Pieces with the Lao Tianli mark are datable to circa the late 19th century, as that factory is well documented.

See link below for another discussion of Lao Tianli work.

Best regards,

Bill H.

URL Title :Lao Tianli

Thanks for your reply. Our information is a little bit differing. Lao Tian Li didn't, along with many other workshops, stamp their earlier pieces. For later export reasons, they began stamping them. It seems in the western collector circuit, we are dating post 1900s cloisonne pieces earlier as late qing while dating earlier pieces as later. Unfortunately, there is not much documentation regarding workshops much like in the zishahu field.

However, given this data, at least you agreed to place it in a similar timeframe. But there's a small hunch that this piece just might go beyond the ROC due to its use of a strictimperial color pallette, workmanship, and the lack of a Tao Lian Li stamp.

The Chinese information is debatable. There seems to be contradictory information about the participation in some of the exhibitions of the early 1900s, at least.

Not to mention, unlike Japanese meiji exports, and focusing on high quality, Chinese exports of the same time took a turn for the worse. Their exports became produced en mass and thus quality went the way of the doo-doo. These dragon bowls suffered drastically in the exports department, and the wire work while sometimes okay, became much worse than the example I'm showing here.

May I also add the aspect of this particular bowl that for each of the three dragons, there are 5 uniquely shaped and unoxidized cloud cloisons for/near that dragon. I have attached a photo identifying the inside dragon's five unique cloisons. Again, the other two dragons also have these 5 unique unoxidized cloud cloisons near them for a total of 15 throughout the entire dish. An artist rendering/interpretation with some sort of meaning behind it? Deliberate for sure.

Again, thanks for your reply.

Lao Tian Li. Oops. I've attached more photos forvreview

3 more photos up close

Check this webpage of a cloisonné expert well known around the Forum:

Bill H.

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