A curious Chinese vase.

[Stan]

Hi Peter, I have had this vase for a long time, I never posted because I assumed it was all printed but looking through a 10X loop it is hand painted except the bottom looks like it was maybe applied with some kind of a stamp, but the rest is hand painted, also the was a 4 character mark on the bottom that was scratched of and repainted you can still see the faint impression of the mark, the vase is 35.6 cm tall and the width is 22.9 cm it looks like a lot of the enamels have rubbed off and you can see where it was there is an impression where the enamels came off, please let me know what you think, the shape is a bit unusual to but very pleasing to the eye. I will send 18 photos to view, thanks.

[Stan]

Here are more photos to view.

[Stan]

More photos to view.

[Stan]

Here are more photos.

[Stan]

Last set of photos, thank again for viewing and feed back.

[peterp]

Stan, sometimes our first impression is correct. You may need to look for more signs of repetitions.
The all red decorations along the foot rim, as well as the red character on the shoulder are all stamped or transfer printed. The black repetitive pattern outlines along the base, and most other outlines look as if they were transfer printed. I cannot see any clear signs of brush strokes. As the outlines may have been painted by hand on paper first, the transfer may have some resemblance to hand-painting. Usually you should have some thick (dark) and a thin (light) end with brush strokes, especially with on-glaze decorations .This is not clearly visible here, but the lines may look irregular due to the manual application of the lines on the transfer substrate, I assume. In many areas you will find that repetitive patterns show similar traits in some lines, curves, etc., which would not be possible in purely hand-painted decorations.

The foot rim is too thick. The mark area looks as if an on-glaze mark was scratched off. The color combination is also not what is usual in antiques. Except with the butterflies, the black outlines are all a bit too strong for my taste.
When looking for repetitive patterns, sometimes immediate neighbouring patterns are not necessarily exactly the same, because individual transfers may include several similar elements at a time, instead of being done one by one.

[Stan]

Thanks Peter, that explains the areas missing enamel, I figured the vase to be fairly recent but the shape intrigued me even though not traditional and the mark being scratched of and touched up gave it a little intrigue.