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Jar and cover

Category

Ceramics

Date

1745 - 1762

Materials

Porcelain, overglaze iron-red and black enamels, and gold

Measurements

285 mm (Height); 287 mm (Diameter)500 mm (Diameter)365 mm (Diameter)

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Collection

Melford Hall, Suffolk

NT 926279.1

Caption

This enormous jar, from the Chinese Qianlong period, mid 17th century, was part of the cargo from the Spanish galleon, Santisima Trinidad, which, laden with presents from the Emperor of Peking to the King of Spain, was captured by Captain Sir Hyde Parker off Manila in 1762. The body of the jar depicts the mythical phoenix, and the cover has a gilded Buddhist dog knob.

Summary

Monumental jar (or parade jar) and cover, one of a pair, porcelain, of tall baluster shape tapering towards the base, the domed cover with a finial in the form of a Buddhist lion-dog (or “dog of Fo”), Jingdezhen, Jiangxi province, China, 1745–62; decorated in iron-red (rouge-de-fer) and black (grisailles) enamel, and heightened with gold, painted with two mythical phoenixes (fenghuang) on a garden terrace with insects, peony and magnolia trees, a fence and rockwork, the neck with a dense ground of formal scrollwork and eight reserved panels with precious objects, the cover with similar dense formal scrollwork.

Full description

This extremely large pair of jars, made in China, in Jingdezhen, between 1745 and 1762, was part of the cargo of a Spanish galleon bound for Acapulco, the Santísima Trinidad y Nuestra Señora del Buen Finn, captured near Manila on 30-31 October 1762 by the Royal Navy led by Captain Sir Hyde Parker (1713–1783) of the HMS Panther—later Vice Admiral and from 1782, 5th Baronet. It was the largest galleon ever built for commercial trade between the Philippines and Acapulco, Mexico, exchanging New World silver for luxury Chinese export goods. The vessel, also known as El Poderoso, (‘the powerful one’), had been forced to return to Manila when it was demasted in a storm, unaware that the city had been taken by the British. Despite a crew of 800, it was unprepared for an attack and eventually surrendered to the HMS Panther and HMS Argo, after almost 100 lives were lost in the battle. The prize estimated at £600,000, included the private cargo of a retired Spanish official and the stock of several Spanish merchants, however, no inventory of their goods was made at the time the vessel was taken. At Melford Hall, which was acquired in 1786 by the captain’s son, Sir Harry Parker, 6th Bt, there is an additional group of seven jars in different sizes and three large dishes, all with the same pattern and palette and including examples executed in “famille rose” enamels (NT 926317.1-5, NT 926318.1-2, NT 926292.1-2 and NT 926348). They were perhaps the stock of a merchant included in the cargo, sailing to Acapulco.. In addition, there is a group of chocolate beakers, also associated with the Iberian markets, that survive at Melford (on loan from the Parker family), which appears to represent samples of the patterns included in the private merchant cargo. European merchants based in Manila were able to travel to Canton where they place orders with the Hongs and buy directly from the many small shopkeepers. JoAnne M. Mancini, however, has proposed that this porcelain could also have been looted from the governor’s palace, elite homes or shops during the brief British occupation of Manila, 1762–64, see J. M. Mancini, ‘Siege Mentalities : Objects in Motion, British Imperial Expansion, and the Pacific Turn’, Winterthur Portfolio, (Summer 2011), vol. 45, no. 2/3, pp. 125–40, p.127. The objects from the cargo at Melford Hall which were allotted to Captain Parker may have been selected by Harry Parker, who acted as his father’s prize agent at the time. The Spanish galleon, its passengers and luxury cargo, which included liquor, spices and all manner of textiles—raw and thrown silks, including priests’ vestments—arrived in Plymouth on 6 June 1764. The contents were sold by type over three years, from September 1764 to February 1767, and dispersed by public auctions (sold 'by the candle') held at Garraway’s Coffee House in Exchange-alley Cornhill, in the city of London. One advertisement in the Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser, announced the sale of China ware on October 1766, listing for sale: ‘about 90,000 basons, 40,000 chocolate cups, 13,000 saucers, 8,000 cups, 8,000 plates, 1,000 dishes, 2,000 tea-cups, as well as bowls, jars, tureens, &c., Being the remainder of the cargo of the Santissima Trinidad, a Spanish prize, from the Manillas’. The sales continued until February 1767, when all was sold and the funds distributed to the officers and crew, earning Captain Parker the sum of about £10,000. Large, tall jars for display were produced for export markets from the late seventeenth century and throughout the eighteenth century. They are sometime known as ‘soldier vases’ or ‘dragoon vases’, after a group of Kangxi blue-and-white porcelain jars with horizontal bands of qilong (hornless dragon) which were acquired by Augustus the Strong in 1717 from Frederick William I, King in Prussia (r. 1713–1740), included in a transaction of 151 porcelain objects exchanged for a regiment of 600 soldiers (German: Dragoner). Fourteen examples of the type are in the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, see for example PO 1008, and there are two examples of the same design at Petworth House, Sussex, evidence the pattern was not exclusive to Prussia. The colour palette on the Melford jars was introduced in the late Kangxi period (1662-1722), however, the shape and pattern suggests a date at the transition of the Yongzheng period (1723-1735) and the early Qianlong period (1735-1796). There is a similar pair of monumental jars at Holkham Hall, Norfolk, perhaps from the same Spanish consignment. Other examples of the shape and pattern include: a pair of jars sold at Sotheby’s, London, 15 November 2022, lot 133, catalogued as Qianlong period (1736-95), with later replacement covers attributed to E. Samson & Cie., Paris; a pair, also identified as Qianlong period, sold at Christie’s, Paris, 28 November 2018, lot 704; and a singleton, attributed to the Yongzheng period (1723-1734), sold at Carlo Bonte Auctions, Belgium,12 December 2017 lot 154. Such jars were sometimes ordered in sets of four for the Iberian market, for example three pairs are known with the arms of Don Fernando Valdés y Tamón (1681–1741), Governor-General of the Philippines from 1729 to 1739, see J. Mudge, Chinese Export Porcelain in North America, New York, 1986, p. 48: one pair is in the Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum, Rotterdam, circa 1740, which is almost half the height and less elongated. Another set of four survive with the arms of Philip V of Spain, see also Rocío Díaz, Chinese Armorial Porcelain for Spain, Jorge Welsh Books, 2010, cat. no. 6 and 7. In 1869, The Architect (vol. 2, p. 50), published details of a visit to Melford Hall on 31 July: “Visits were paid to Melford Hall, the seat of Sir William Parker––a red brick building with a good deal of Elizabethan character externally, but more or less modernised inside, and rich in magnificent specimens of china and ivory carvings, much of them ‘loot’, seized by a gallant ancestor of the present owner on board a Spanish galleon.” By family repute, first documented in 1867, the cargo was said to be destined for a Spanish King; the provenance was repeated by Lady Hyde Parker in her Official Guide to Melford Hall, 1957, where she notes: “Taken from the Spanish galleon the Santissima Trinidad, which in 1762 on its way to Spain with its cargo of presents from the Emperor of Pekin to the King of Spain, was intercepted and captured by Admiral Sir Hyde Parker, 5th Baronet”. The jars have recently been studied by Dr Cinta Krahe in a paper read to the Oriental Ceramic Society in June 2024.

Provenance

Part of the Hyde Parker Collection. The hall and part of the collection were Accepted in Lieu and transferred by the Treasury to the National Trust in 1960

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