White Porcelain Bottle with Landscape Design in Underglaze Cobalt Blue

Joseon Period (19th Century)

This bottle is a characteristic example of the nineteenth-century Joseon form: a rounded, full body from which a straight neck rises cleanly to an everted mouth rim. At three points around the body, landscape scenes are rendered in underglaze blue within double circular medallions, executed in fine, delicate brushwork that imparts a quality of crisp, understated refinement. The glaze is a white porcelain glaze with a faint suffusion of pale blue — limpid and evenly lustrous. The foot ring is broad and low, lending the vessel a composed stability, and traces of fine sand kiln supports on which the piece was fired remain on the base. Produced at the Bunwon-ri kiln in Gwangju during the first half of the nineteenth century as a wine bottle, this piece is distinguished above all by the quietly compelling presence of the landscape vignettes contained within their double-ringed medallions.