Chinese Lidded Wine Vessel

Two lions, one tangle of peonies, and nobody seems to mind the crowding.

This lidded wine vessel was made in Jingdezhen, China, during the Qing Dynasty (1644 – 1912 CE), in porcelain. The slender meiping shape, broad at the shoulder and narrow at the foot, has a long history at Jingdezhen and was usually meant to hold wine. Here cobalt blue lions with tightly curled manes stride across a white ground thick with peonies, leaves and spiraling tendrils. The shoulder carries a band of hatched panels, the foot a frieze of tall stylized ones. A small capped lid closes the neck. It is 16 inches high and 7.25 in diameter.

The painter clearly never ran short of blue.