I purchased this stack of fifteen Swatow Ware bowls one morning at my local Chez Vivi. It was a bit of a shock seeing so many at once. Some sticker shock too. The good kind. Ten dollars for the lot.
These humble bowls were made in China between the late Ming period of the seventeenth century and the early nineteenth century. Work of this type was produced over a long period of time. Many of the examples seen today come from shipwrecks, such as the cargo of the Tek Sing, a Chinese vessel that sank in 1822 which was discovered in 1999. These examples appear to have wear patterns consistent with an extended period of use. This suggests that they came down through generations of owners rather than from the ocean floor.
Each was thrown on a potters wheel and has a trimmed foot. The lip has a slight outward flare that makes it easy to pull the bowls individually from the stack. There is a certain casualness to the form that integrates well with the looseness of the brushwork. The many surface flaws include bloating, iron spots and bits of debris embedded in the glaze. Several were fired in uneven atmospheres with swaths of oxidation. The best here have the clean blue tinge of a well reduced firing.
These might just as easily have been picked up by someone who had no idea of their origin. They might simply have wanted something attractive to serve food in. There wouldn’t be any problem with that. These bowls are just as functional today as they were two or three hundred years ago. Good ceramics outlast us all.
Diameters range from 15.5 to 16.5 centimetres.
