Extending one of the most remarkable stories in the market for Chinese works of art, Sotheby’s will sell the pair to a Qianlong vase first re-discovered at a regional UK auction house in 2010 and hammered for £43m. That price was not paid for but the work sold a few years later for £25m, still a substantial sum.
Now Sotheby’s reveals that the Tang Ying vase was originally one of a pair of vases. Sotheby’s Nicholas Chow located the second vase which was owned by a Japanese collector for nearly a century and will auction it in Hong Kong this Fall:
Carved and exquisitely painted with four pairs of fish below Rococo-inspired motifs on a yellow sgraffiato ground, the exceptional famille-rose reticulated vase is skillfully modelled with an inner blue-and-white vase, which can be glimpsed through the openwork lattice, placing it among the most complex and rarest porcelains from the Qianlong period ever to have emerged on the market.