White Porcelain Brush Container with Lotus and Chrysanthemum Design in Underglaze Cobalt Blue

Joseon Period (19th Century)

This brush holder (piltong) takes a tall, slender cylindrical form. Painted in underglaze blue, chrysanthemum blossoms — each rendered showing only half the flower — and their branches are depicted in a gently tilted, diagonal composition that lends the design a sense of natural, unstudied ease. The glaze is a white porcelain glaze with a faint suffusion of pale blue, applied across the surface with a soft and restrained luster. Produced at the Bunwon-ri kiln in Gwangju during the first half of the nineteenth century as a vessel for holding writing brushes, this piece embodies the quiet, spare elegance that is among the most admired qualities of the scholarly desk objects of the period.