65 - A Superb Longquan Celadon Garlic Vase, Yuan dynastyvery finely potted, with the slightly compressed globular body rising to the slender neck, which terminates in a garlic bulb mouth, and with the neck and belly both encircled by a single horizontal bowstring line in low rounded relief, the body covered overall in a good sea green glaze, except on the unglazed footrim which is burnt red in the firing. A closely comparable vase of this rare Yuan type, now in the Sir Percival David Collection at the British Museum, is illustrated by Margaret Medley in the Illustrated Catalogue of Celadon Wares in the Percival David Collection of Chinese Art, London,1977, p.32,no.96. A pair of Yuan tobi seiji bottle vases of identical form were sold in Christies Hong Kong, 30 November 2016, lot 3133, from the Yangdetang collection, where the catalogue mentions two similar Longquan garlic neck vases, one of them plain with two moulded bowstring bands, that were discovered in the Sinan coast shipwreck, which foundered off Korea en route to Japan in AD 1323 (illustrated in Relics salvaged from the seabed off Sinan, Seoul, 1985, pp.38-39, nos.31 and 32). Vases of this type were popular in Japan as flower vases to be used during the tea ceremony, and are not unlikely to have a Japanese collection provenance on the rare occasions when one appears. However, the garlic mouth bottle shape, and the bowstring lines around neck and body, ultimately derive from a Han dynasty bronze form. This is a reflection of the great birth of scholarly antiquarianism in the Song and Yuan periods, which found expression in illustrated catalogues and encyclopaedias, which were to become pattern books for the ceramic artists and bronze casters of the time. Indeed, the Xuanhe bogu tu , the catalogue of the Song Emperor Huizongs archaic bronze collection, contains woodcut line illustrations of a Han dynasty bronze bottle of garlic neck form. H:28cm [Good condition] Link of detail photos: