Celadon Bottle                           

Goryeo dynasty, late 11th to early 12th century                

Stoneware with grey bluish-green glaze

Height 23.2 cm                                                                                                                       

The bottle with its low foot, bulbous body and long slender neck that flares gently towards the mouth is of elegant shape. The entire bottle, including the base and footring, is covered with a finely crackled, lustrous, grey bluish-green glaze. The base shows five small spur-marks and an X-shaped incised mark underneath the glaze. The elegant perfectly balanced shape together with the superb bluish-green colour of the glaze make this bottle a masterpiece of the subtle, understated elegance characteristic of the earliest undecorated Goryeo celadons.

Published:

Bo Gyllensvard, Chinese Ceramics in the Carl Kempe Collection, Stockholm, 1964, p. 255, pl. 875.

Exhibited:

Ostasiatika Museet (Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities) Stockholm, Koreansk Keramik (Korean Ceramics), Stockholm, 1966, p. 19, no. 20.

Similar Examples:

Goryeo celadon bottles of this type are exceedingly rare. The most closely related example is in the National Museum of Korea and an example of slightly different shape is in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge:

Sunu Choi and Gakuji Hasebe, eds. Sekai tōji zenshū, volume 18: Koryo Dynasty, Tokyo: Shogakukan, 1978, pl. 123.

Yun Yong-i, Korean Art from the Gompertz and Other Collections in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, Cambridge, 2005, p. 133, pl. 67 and colour pl. 11.

For two related bottles of slightly different shape in the Museum of Oriental Ceramics, Osaka and the British Museum respectively, see:

Ikutarō Itoh and Yutaka Mino, The Radiance of Jade and the Clarity of Water: Korean Ceramics From The Ataka Collection, Chicago, 1991, p. 41, pl. 5.

Jane Portal, Korea: Art and Archaeology, London, 2000, p. 101, pl. 52.