Lot 160

A pair of Chinese lac Burgauté lacquer dishes with scenes from the 'Gengzhi tu' (Pictures of tilling and weaving), the reverse with Kangxi studio mark 'Jing Teng Tang Zhi'. Both dishes depicting scenes of figures working in rice fields. The 'Gengzhi Tu' is the title for a series of scroll paintings first created in the Southern Song Dynasty (1127-1279) by an official named Lou Shou 樓璹 (1090-1162). His paintings showed scenes of different work processes of agriculture and sericulture. The second Qing emperor, Kangxi (1654-1722; r. 1662-1722) commissioned a new series of paintings based on the Song model of Lou Shou’s Pictures of Tilling and Weaving. The set was completed in 1696 in forty-six images by Jiao Bingzhen 焦秉貞 (1689-1726),[1] who included Western perspective in his version of the illustrations, China, Kangxi period (1662-1722) -D. 12 cm, repairs to the rims-