White Porcelain Dish with the Design of Clouds, Cranes and Daoist Immortal in Underglaze Cobalt Blue

Joseon Period (19th Century)

This dish presents a shallow form with a wide, everted mouth rim and a tall foot ring. The upper surface is decorated in underglaze blue with a composition worthy of a finished painting: an immortal sage (sinseon) soars through the heavens astride a magnificent crane, surrounded by billowing clouds, and below the composition the inscription Seunghak Sinseon (乘鶴神仙, "Immortal Riding a Crane") is written in a confident, practiced hand. The exterior is painted with long, drooping flowering branches in underglaze blue. The glaze is a white porcelain glaze with a faint suffusion of pale blue — bright and evenly lustrous. Produced at the Bunwon-ri kiln in Gwangju during the first half of the nineteenth century, a period in which auspicious longevity motifs were painted with particular frequency and exuberance, this dish bears its imagery of the crane-riding immortal as a pictorial expression of the wish for long life — a theme rendered here with a painterly assurance and narrative vitality that elevate it well above the conventional.