Single-Owner Estate Chinese Dynastic Ceramics 2023-08-19 Auction - 255 Price Results - Ripley Auctions in IN
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Pair Archaic Dynastic Chinese carved stone / limestone monument megalith blocks with Dragon panelsChinese Ge Yao crackle glaze lobed ceramic vase with zoomorphic mask and fixed ring handles. 8 1/2"Cosme Tura, Italian 15th Century (c. 1430 – 1495), St. Catherine of Alexandria (Santa Caterina d'
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Indianapolis, IN, United States
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Single-Owner Estate Chinese Dynastic Ceramics

Every collection is to some extent a self-portrait. The collection that will form the centerpiece of our August 19th auction captures quite faithfully the intense curiosity, sense of adventure and charming humor of its founders and owners, Linda and her late husband Ronald (Ron) Williams. Intrepid globetrotters who were equally passionate, among other things, about the arcane roots and evolution of Chinese art and about the striking beauty of sundry varieties of orchids, they devoted much of their time and attention to a collection that would easily stir the envy of many museums. Imagine now a museum whose atmosphere is anything but stuffy or professorial, and which welcomes you with its understated, but unmistakable elegance, and is flanked by a large garden that is itself a feat of art and design, and an open-air museum / playground (a wonderland for Linda and Ron?s grandchildren). If you do so, you are beginning to get the picture of the ideal setting in which this collection was patiently and lovingly gathered over some five decades of marriage and of joint exploration. There was certainly a method to this process, and you get the impression that Linda and Ron responded with remarkable consistency to artworks that revealed the spontaneous elegance of nature as well as to objects that permeate our everyday life and render it ? and us ? more graceful. You see this in things as varied as contemporary Italian paintings of autumnal landscapes or Asian carved wood panels, stunning majolica or fine cut glass. But there is also plenty of whimsy to go with that method, and you can spot it in a variety of lots, from prints by Toulouse-Lautrec, the master of whimsy, verging on the naughty, to the occasional ceremonial mask or ritual dagger! The core of this collection, however, is a truly impressive homage to archaic and classical Chinese ceramic. We are talking about roughly two hundred cups, jars, pots etc. spanning more than two millennia, each of which could
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