Blue-and-white porcelain incense box depicting Zhou Maoshu

China, Ming dynasty, late sixteenth–early seventeenth century.

Small quadrangular blue-and-white porcelain incense box with softened corners. The underglaze-blue decoration depicts Zhou Maoshu, better known as Zhou Dunyi (1017–1073), the Northern Song dynasty Neo-Confucian philosopher, shown leaning against a balustrade.

Zhou Dunyi wrote the celebrated Ai Lian Shuo (“Discourse on the Love of the Lotus”), a fundamental text of Chinese literati culture in which the lotus symbolises the moral purity and integrity of the sage. The theme became widespread in the decorative arts of the late Ming period, particularly on objects associated with incense and the scholar’s studio.

The model for this box is recorded in specialised Japanese literature on kōgō. A comparable example, illustrated under the title 染付周茂叔 (Sometsuke Shū Moshu), appears in Koga Kenzō’s Kōgō, published by Kawara Shoten in 1998.

Small chip to one corner of the lid.

Dimensions: 4 × 4 cm.