Archaic Bronze Food Vessel (gui)
Late Western Zhou period, 9th - 8th century BC
Height: 24.8cm
Base: 24.2cm x 24.0cm
Weight: 11.5kg
Ritual bronze food vessel in the form of a waisted bowl with flared foot-ring and flattened everted lip, standing on a high square base. The bowl is cast in low relief with a central continuous band of U-shaped waves, with scrolls and C-shapes between and inside the waves. The foot-ring of the vessel is encircled by U-shaped lappets. Above the central register is a band of dissolved elongated dragons, with a pair of animal masks in high relief placed equidistant from each handle. The handles are of massive form, each cast with a dragon head sporting a central horn, long ears, and curling snout, and projecting well beyond the square base. The base itself is decorated with a design of conforming waves all around and pairs of stylized confronted birds on top. The vessel is covered with a rich brownish patina with extensive cuprite and malachite encrustation. The underside is hollow with casting lines visible.
The interior is cast with thirty-four characters in a five-line inscription, some of which was intentionally obliterated in antiquity and is now mostly indecipherable. However, six of the characters may be read separately as
Bo … fu … zuo … yong … zi … bao
which may be translated as follows:
Sir (or Bai [a surname]) … father … to make … use … son … treasure
Provenance:
Acquired from S. Bing, Paris (14th December 1912).
Adolphe Stoclet, Brussels.
Madame Féron-Stoclet, Brussels.
Exhibited:
Paris, 1934, Musée de L’Orangerie.
London, 1935-36, Royal Academy of Arts.
Published:
Georges Salles, ‘Bronzes Chinois des Dynasties Tcheou, Ts’in and Han’ (Catalogue of an Exhibition in Musée de L’Orangerie), Paris, 1934, number 395.
‘International Exhibition of Chinese Art’, London, 1935-36, number 163.
H.F.E. Visser, ‘Asiatic Art in Private Collections of Holland and Belgium’, Amsterdam, 1948, plate 16, number 20.
Georges A. Salles and Daisy Lion-Goldschmidt, ‘Collection Adolphe Stoclet’, Brussels, 1956, pages 336-337.
Albert J. Koop, ‘Early Chinese Bronzes’, New York, 1971, plate 50b.
Similar examples:
Vadime Elisseeff, ‘Archaic Chinese Bronzes’, volume 1, Paris, 1977, number 17 and colour plate opposite page XVIII, for the almost identical example in the Cernuschi Museum, Paris.
Laurence P. Roberts, ‘The Bernard Berenson Collection of Oriental Art at Villa I Tatti’, New York, 1991, pages 68-69, number 17 for a very similar vessel, also with a five-line inscription on the interior, now no longer legible. According to the records at the Villa I Tatti, the bronze may have been purchased from E. Worch in Paris in 1914.
Of the two similar examples cited above, the vessel in the Cernuschi Museum in Paris is the closest to the Stoclet example. The Berenson vessel is also very close in its decoration and only differs in that some of the C-shapes within the wave band on the base are reversed. The latter seems also to have been originally cast with a five-line inscription, of which only two characters are now decipherable – bao and yong – both of which are found on the Stoclet vessel. The Cernuschi gui on the other hand appears to have an unrelated three-character inscription.
After close examination, Dr Anna Bennett, of Conservation and Technical Services, is of the opinion that the attempt to efface the inscription on the present vessel was made in antiquity.