China, Yuan Dynasty, 1271 to 1368 CE. This is a unique piece that has been fascinating us at the gallery! This is a trio of Jun ware small pottery vessels, one with a handle, that fused around a central, unglazed piece of pottery (potentially some kind of saggar?), most likely due to too high a temperature inside the kiln. Their glaze is pale green. Jun wares are typically heavily potted and have an unglazed, round base with thick glaze -- often frozen at the point of dripping -- above it. None of these wares have been excavated south of the Yangtze River, so it seems likely that they were just for domestic use in northern China (other wares from this period seem to have been explicitly made for export). The Yuan Dynasty, established by the Mongolian warlord Kublai Khan, established the Fuliang Ciju (Fuliang Porcelain Bureau), entrusted with porcelain production, at the kilning center of Jingdezhen. Other kilning centers included Henan, Hebei, Shanxi, and Inner Mongolia. A piece like this, known among archaeologists as a "waster", is usually from a kiln site, where large numbers of such misfired pieces would have been discarded. Size: 5.6" L x 5.6" W x 5" H (14.2 cm x 14.2 cm x 12.7 cm).

Provenance: Ex-Paul & Louise Bernheimer collection, Cambridge, MA and Laguna Woods, CA.

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#111794

This is the result of a kiln misfire and as such the piece is a conglomeration of four pieces that cannot be separated without breaking them. However, aside from a minor chip to one foot, they are all as intact as the day they were kilned; there is some cracking to the glaze.