"Family Collection" continues to pay attention to the special program "The Return of Imperial Porcelain". Today I want to talk to you about the Ming Dynasty Chenghua Doucai Sanqiu Cup in the collection of the Palace Museum. Why is it called the Sanqiu Cup, and how did it come to the Palace Museum?
The name Sanqiu Cup comes from the fact that it depicts a beautiful autumn scene, and autumn generally lasts for three months, hence the name. There is only one pair of Chenghua Doucai Sanqiu Cup, all of which were donated to the Palace Museum in 1956 by the late Mr. Sun Yingzhou, a famous porcelain expert.
The composition of the whole picture of the Sanqiu Cup is outlined with underglaze blue and white to paint the mountain stone, and the main colors are wild chrysanthemum, lilies, flower buds, and orchid branches and leaves. Supplemented by butterflies, bees, and lilies filled in the glaze. The blue and white outer wall under the glaze outlines six butterflies, two bees, three wild chrysanthemums, three lilies, and mountain stones, orchids, flowers and leaves as a lining. The other glazes are all decent, but there are only two butterflies that are different.
Jiangxi Provincial Museum docent Wei Yue introduced, the color of the two butterflies is called Yin Zicai, the color is like rust red, it is the difference color defect produced during firing, and the imperial kiln originally intended to create a purple glaze, so this color is called poor purple, but later generations to take the beauty of "Yin Zi Yan Hong", so it was renamed Yin Zicai.
It can be said that there is no one in the past, and there is no one in the future, but it is unique to the imperial kiln of the Chenghua Dynasty. The donor of this cup, Mr. Sun Yingzhou, described the purple as "the color defect of the difference when firing", "the purple is thick but dull", and it also left a mystery to future generations, but fortunately, Mr. Sun Yingzhou left the Doucai Sanqiu Cup to the Forbidden City.
The drawing and color matching of the three autumn cups are very original, lilies, wild chrysanthemums, orchids, daylilies and mountain stones are displayed in a large area with underglaze blue and white, trampling butterflies, bees filling in purple, beeswax yellow, especially the purple color, which forms a sharp contrast with the large area of elegant blue, which is more otherworldly, noble and elegant. During the Chenghua years, a lot of such Sanqiu cups were made, but there were very few that could be selected to enter the palace.
Cao Jianwen, a professor at the School of Ceramic Arts of Jingdezhen Ceramic University, said that the Chenghua Doucai Chicken Cup had been auctioned at a sky-high price of 280 million, and the value of this Sanqiu Cup was even no less than that of the Chicken Cup. In the Ming Dynasty, the quality requirements of imperial porcelain were very strict, and the flawed imperial porcelain was usually smashed and buried on the spot, and the rejection rate was very high, among which Chenghua Doucai was the most. The production of the Sanqiu Cup is more stringent, but if there is a little flaw in the white tire or blue and white, it will be regarded as a waste product, so what you see now is a treasure of one in a thousand, which is also an important reason why the Chenghua Doucai Sanqiu Cup is so rare.