A large and superbly painted and incised Cizhou 'peony and butterfly' bowl, Song dynasty宋 磁州褐彩劃牡丹蝴蝶紋缽sturdily potted with deep rounded sides rising from a splayed foot, the exterior freely and superbly painted in dark-brown and highlighted with incisions with a large peony bloom wreathed by slender leaves and two butterflies fluttering nearby, all against a creamy-white slip and a transparent glaze stopping neatly above the foot revealing the stoneware bodyw. 20 cm拍品专文: The distinctive style of this charming bowl, with its freely painted designs in black on white and with details incised and combed through the black down to the white slip, is characteristic of the Cizhou-type site at Guantai in Ci county, Hebei province. The swiftly drawn black motifs immediately call to mind ink paintings, and the white combed details evoke the ‘flying white’ method of brushwork much used in calligraphy, created by a brush that runs out of ink, whose hairs separate and cause white streaks to appear in a black stroke.Deep rounded bowls, such as the present example, are one of the most iconic forms produced at the Cizhou kilns during the Northern Song and Jin periods. Several bowls of this form were excavated from the Guantai kilns. The form is found applied with a plain white glaze and with a variety of sgraffiato techniques, including incised designs on a wave ground, designs both incised and cut away, and designs painted and incised through a dark slip, as with the current example. This type of sgraffiato designs on deep bowls largely incorporates bold, freely painted naturalistic motifs. A fragmentary deep bowl similarly decorated with a sprig of peony with incised veining was excavated from Guantai, illustrated in Guantai Cizhou yaozhi / The Cizhou Kiln Site at Guantai, Beijing, 1997, p. 85, and pl. XIII, no. 3 (centre). For bowls decorated with butterflies only, see an example in the Umezawa Kinenkan Museum, Tokyo, published in Hasebe Gakuji, Chugoku no toji /Chinese ceramics, vol. 7: Jisshuyo / Cizhou ware, Tokyo, 1996, pl. 66; and another from the collections of the Manno Art Museum, Osaka, and Linyushanren, sold twice at Christie’s Hong Kong, 28th October 2002, lot 516, and 22nd March 2018, lot 514.Compare also Cizhou vases similarly decorated with peony sprays and butterflies in the same technique, such as a truncated meiping, or tuluping, included in the Illustrated Catalogues of Tokyo National Museum. Chinese Ceramics I, Tokyo, 1988, no. 567, together with one with lotus bouquets and butterflies, no. 566; and a further example in the MOA Museum of Art, Shizuoka, exhibited in Charm of Black & White Ware; Transition of Cizhou Type Wares, Osaka Municipal Museum of Art, Osaka, 2002, cat. no. 78.