Qianjiang porcelain bowl

[Adriano]

I have just bought this piece.
Judging by glaze fault and pale color of enamel it should be Guangxu period, I think.
It seem to me that there is a cyclical date yi si: excluding 1845, it could be 1905.
I would like to have help with calligraphy.
Thank you.

[Adriano]

calligraphy

[Adriano]

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[peterp]

Adriano, can you read Chinese?

The year is right, but it cannot be 1845 because Qianjiang painting was just beginning at the time, and there were only a few people known to have used it then. It really only started taking off in the Tongzhi and especially the Guangxu reign. So, 1905 could be right. The painter is given as 張石英 (Zhang Shi-ying). It must be one of the less know ones, I cannot find the name in the listing of Qianjiang painters (which is incomplete, however).

[Adriano]

Hi Peter,
I cannot read Chinese.
I just look at a cyclical date table to find similar ideograms: this one is very easy to recognize, I think.
Less known painters are welcome: the most famous are in museums and top collections.
Thank you very much for your help.

[peterp]

Reading this type of hand-writing is sometimes not easy, even when one has known Chinese for decades.

[JjGhandi]

A very beautiful piece Adriano, congratulations.

Kind regards,

JJ

[Adriano]

Thank you JjGhandi,
Chinese Qianjiang is porcelain I like more.
Best Regards,
Adriano

[Adriano]

Hi Peter,
could be the painter name Zhang Ziying instead of Shiying?
The style of this painter is very similar to that of my bowl.
You can find many pictures here: line.17qq.com/article/nnookdhlv.html.

Many thanks.

[peterp]

Adriano,
Of the two pieces shown on that page the upper is indeed very likely zi, the lower one could be either, because when making the strokes fast the two characters can look similar. The stroke direction and order is the same.

FYI, qianjiang painters were not into calligraphy, their writing is often not standard, so that even native Chinese speakers sometimes cannot read the hand-written characters.
These two are not in a Qianjiang painters' list I looked at. Further, this specific decoration was made by many different painters, so it might not be a well-known one. There were hundreds of them, literally.

[Adriano]

Thank you Peter.
I see that the subject is complicated, but for me interesting topic of research and learning.