Terracotta A Very Fine and Rare Pair of Painted Pottery Birds, Handy Dynasty - μήκος 18 cm. καθε! - 7 cm

Han Dynasty (206BC - AD220)
Good condition, much of the original pigment remaining.
Wide 18 cm.

Note: It will be professionally packed and safely sent within 3 working days by UPS. Shipped with Insurance!

Our Guarantee: The above item is guaranteed to be of the time period and condition as described, has been purchased legally and is legal to buy and sell under all international laws to cultural patrimony.

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with expressive curved heads and resting on squared bronze webbed feet, decorated with traces of red, yellow, green, brown, pink, and white pigment, bronze feet form later date.

Compare very similar pottery bird on sale by Van Der Ven Oriental art offer in their website for €4800, - the price is for only one piece. See photo # 41

Condition: Wear, old, aged patina, oxidation. The beak of left bird - small part missing, the tail re-glued in two parts (with all the original pieces!) Originally wooden or bronze legs are long gone in the tomb. Very good, preserved condition. Please be advised the pieces are ca. 2000 years old.

Provenance:
private collection, The Netherlands
Asian art market.


Additional Information

The Han dynasty (206 BCE–220 CE)

The Han period saw the gradual abandonment of human immolation. Burial practices were adopted that required a large number of goods accompanying the dead. The result was an increase in demand of mortuary objects made of clay. To make sure that the deceased were well provisioned in the after world, tombs were furnished with rich variety of pottery objects including utilitarian vessels, male and female attendants, livestock, horses and carts, goose, and birds. These objects are fine example of Han pottery sculpture and provide useful information about everyday life of the Han people.

The first pottery to survive in appreciable quantities belongs to the Han dynasty; most of it has been excavated from graves. Perhaps the commonest form is the hu, a baluster-shaped vase copied from bronze vessels of the same name and sometimes decorated with relief ornament in friezes taken directly from a bronze original. The hill jar, which has a cover molded to represent the Daoist “Isles of the Blest,” is another fairly frequent form, and many models of servants, domestic animals, buildings, wellheads, dovecotes, and the like also have been discovered in graves.

Han glazed wares are chiefly of two types. Northern China saw the invention, presumably for funerary purposes only, of a low-fired lead glaze, tinted bottle-green with copper oxide, that degenerates through burial to an attractive silvery iridescence. High-fired stoneware with a thin brownish to olive glaze was still being made in Henan, but the main centre of production was already shifting to the Zhejiang region, formerly known as Yue. Yue ware kilns of the Eastern Han, located at Deqing in northern Zhejiang, produced a hard stoneware, often imitating the shapes of bronze vessels and decorated with impressed, bronze like designs under a thin olive glaze. Other important provincial centres for pottery production in the Han dynasty were Changsha (in Hunan province) and Chengdu and Chongqing (in Sichuan province).[1]

Important information.
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1- britannica