Large blue and white dish, Probably Chu Dau kilns, Red River Delta, northern Vietnam, 1440-1460

Large blue and white dish, finely painted under the glaze in cobalt blue with a single large chrysanthemum flower in the centre and floral scroll in the cavetto.. Probably Chu Dau kilns, Red River Delta, northern Vietnam, 1440-1460, stoneware. Diameter: 36.9 centimetres. Brooke Sewell Permanent Fund. Purchased from Eric Nissen. Ex-collection Ella Bodor. 2009,3014.5. British Museum © The Trustees of the British Museum.

Purchased from the Nissen Collection The dish with chrysanthemum design was once in the F.W. Bodor collection and was found and purchased by Frederick Bodor on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi in the early 1960s. F. W. Bodor was a well known Sydney collector, mainly of trade ceramics. He had a number of pieces in the Exhibition "Oriental Trade Ceramics in Southeast Asia, 10-16th century", John Guy, presented by the National Gallery of Victoria, 1980. The present owner was unsuccessful in purchasing the dish with chrysanthemum design privately over several years and ultimately gave up, thinking they had been given to the Australian museum, until one day in 1997 he found them in a Sotheby’s catalogue, consigned by Ella Bodor. The dish was also published by Tsugio Mikami, Ceramic Art of the World, Volume 16, Southeast Asia, Shogakukan, 1984, col. pl. 142. It has been on loan at the British Museum since 1999 and was exhibited at the British Museum as part of a display of Vietnamese Ceramics in 2001.

Bibliography: Guy, John; Stephenson, John, Vietnamese Ceramics: A separate tradition, Chicago, 1997, p.304, no. 238

Exhibition : 2014 Sep-2015 Jan, BM WCEC, 'Ming: 50 years that changed China'