Extremely Rare Cistern and Basin (Made for the Dutch Market)

This set is extremely rare. Only two small batches were made because the highly detailed design was very costly to produce. Few survive with both pieces intact. This set is brightly enameled in famille rose with a scene showing three elaborately robed figures seated beneath a flowering tree with a fourth simply clothed figure standing behind them. Two seated figures hold a fish. In the foreground, a kraak
porcelain dish rests on a table of European design. In the background, a peacock perched on a fence watches a bird in a tree. The interior of the basin includes fish trios in panels.

The scene on this cistern and basin is known as “The Doctor’s Visit to the Emperor” and is after a design by Dutch artist Cornelis Pronk. It was the second drawing of four that the Dutch East India Company commissioned from Pronk in 1735, and like the others it portrays a Western view of life in
China. For example, as noted above, the table is of European design and the dish on it is of the kraak style, a type that was exported to the West in the late 16th and 17thcenturies and would never have been used by the Emperor.

The design may have been inspired by a scene on a Ming jar that depicts three Daoist star-gods in a cave playing chess or a scene on a late Ming bowl that depicts the poet Su Dongpo on a boat seated at a table with two drinking companions with an inscription about catching fish. The fish
may have meaning in Dutch language folklore, such as Aesop’s fable of The Fisherman and the Little Fish in which the fish begs the fisherman to release him until he is a bigger meal in the future. The fisherman says no, stating, “A little thing in the hand is more than a great thing in prospect.