Ashmolean Eastern Art Online, Yousef Jameel Centre for Islamic and Asian Art

Although blue-and-white vases of this type are well known, this version, with a light green glaze covering a plain middle section, is highly unusual and may represent at trial that was not continued. For a blue-and-white vase painted with peacocks and peonies in the centre see Song Liangbi (ed.), Guangdong Sheng Bowuguan cang taoci xuan [Selection of ceramics from the Guangdong Provincial Museum], Beijing, 1992, pl.119.

The tall vase has a narrow, widely flared neck with an angled rim flange, the sides have an S-shaped profile, with a wide, rounded shoulder and the piece rests on a broad shallow footring. The vase is painted under the glaze in a soft cobalt-blue with a cloud collar with four lappets enclosing lotus sprays between formal cloud motifs round the shoulder, a narrow stylized ruyi border below the neck, florets flanked by leaves around it, the rim being painted in blue, and a band of petal panels enclosing foliate motifs at the foot. The painted areas are covered with a colourless glaze, but the main part of the vase, which was left plain, is covered with a mottled light green celadon glaze, densely suffused with bubbles, which has imperceptively blended with the white glaze at the shoulder, but covers the colourless glaze and partly obliterates the blue painted design at the foot, where it ran down in thick streaks. The base and footring are left in the biscuit, which has turned a light orange.