The Yamanaka Reticulated Vase
The Yamanaka reticulated vase, one of the most complex porcelains ever conceived by Tang Ying for the Emperor Qianlong, will come up at Sotheby’s autumn series of sales in Hong Kong. It is a pair to a vase which sold at hammer at Bainbridges for £43 million in 2010 to a Chinese billionaire who subsequently baulked at fees of 20%. That sale eventually fell through after a two year stalemate and the vase was eventually sold in a deal brokered by Bonhams to an unidentified buyer from the Far East who is believed to have paid up to £25 million for it.
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.
It was included in the 1905 Yamanaka Exhibition in New York and acquired by a private Japanese collector in 1924.
UPDATE: This sold for HK$149,091,000 / US$19,009,102 / £14,637,024, almost three times the pre-sale estimate