A FINE PAIR OF FAMILLE ROSE 'MANDARIN PATTERN' FLATTENED BALUSTER VASES AND COVERS Qianlong period, circa 1780 The vases and covers each brightly enameled within git C-scrolls with four large fanciful panels of elaborately robed Chinese ladies and gentlemen standing on riverside terraces and enjoying a bucolic rural lifestyle, all reserved on extensive iron-red and gilt diaper-pattern covering the remaining background of the vases and the domed covers set with a front-facing gilt seated-lion finial, the shoulders each applied with two high-relief gilt lion-mask fixed-ring loop handles. 12in (58.4cm) high (2). Footnotes: 乾隆時期 約1780年 粉彩開光《人物故事》雙耳帶蓋扁壺一對 Provenance: Patricia Kluge Collection Published: Cohen & Cohen, Angels & Demonslayers, Hong Kong, 2012, pp. 88-89, no. 56 來源： Patricia Kluge舊藏 出版： 倫敦Cohen & Cohen古董行，《Angels & Demonslayers》，香港，2012年，頁88-89，圖版編號56 Large, covered vases of this innovatory flattened form began to arrive in Europe from about 1770, and proved popular both with Western European buyers and particularly in East-Coast North America. It seems that the English East India Company, retaining its monopoly of shipping Asian items through its English entrepot ports to the US East Coast until the 1770s, had not deemed it commercially worthwhile to ship massive earlier famille rose decorative vases and dishes to potential buyers in colonial Boston, New York or Philadelphia. These new flattened forms, very suitable for dressing a fairly shallow mantlepiece in a way that large globular vases were not, are still to be found in late 18th century East Coast homes, where they may have remained since they first arrived often through the independent China traders who began to trade directly with Canton after February 1784, when the 'Empress of China' began her historic maiden voyage direct to Canton from New Yok harbor.