Item No.: 1054
Name: A yangcai lantern vase with birds and seasonal flowers on a blue brocade ground
Period: Qing dynasty, Qianlong reign
Height: 43.0 cm
The Chinese commentary relates the painting on this vase to the imperial Bird Album. In the fifteenth year of the Qianlong reign, court painters Yu Sheng and Zhang Weibang were ordered to copy an earlier bird album by Jiang Tingxi in the imperial collection. The project took eleven years and produced twelve volumes containing 360 paintings. It encompassed six broad categories of birds, including songbirds, climbing birds, land birds, birds of prey, wading birds, and swimming birds, representing more than three hundred birds of many species.
Officials including Fuheng examined the birds’ forms and habits. The emperor also requested careful review of their names, origins, and behavior. The paintings combined the boneless technique associated with Yun Shouping, in which forms are rendered through color rather than conspicuous outlines, with Western approaches to light, shade, tone, and perspective. Short, fine strokes distinguish smooth, close-set back feathers from the soft down of the belly.
The four-sided vase uses a blue brocade ground enriched with floral ornament. Its scenes of seasonal flowers and corresponding birds employ similarly detailed brushwork and Western-inspired modeling. They include a white-feathered golden eagle on a plum branch in winter, red-billed mynas among magnolias and roses in spring, birds calling among maple leaves and chrysanthemums, and pink-footed geese playing among reeds and roses.