Vintage Chinese Famille Rose Vase Pair – Hand Painted Birds & Peonies, Calligraphy Poems, Wood Stands, Jingdezhen Porcelain, 1970s

A matched pair of Chinese porcelain vases, one tall, one small, each on its own hardwood stand. Both are painted with birds among peonies — a paradise flycatcher on the larger, a yellow oriole on the smaller — and both carry a poem in running script with red seals. Fine black borders ring necks and feet. The tall vase is about 8 inches; its companion 5¾.

Painted by hand in famille rose enamels over the glaze, then fired again. The peonies show it plainly: the pink is built up in washes from the heart outward, so each petal is darker at its base and pales toward the edge, and the layered enamel stands slightly proud of the surface. Leaves are filled in turquoise and yellow-green, varying where the brush was reloaded; branches are drawn in brown outline with the stops and starts of a hand. The black borders — ruyi heads at the lip, dotted swags below, key-fret at the shoulder — were drawn line by line with a fine brush, each slightly uneven as printing never is. The poems are brush-written; the seals stamped in iron red.

Circa 1970s. Each base carries a paper label reading "Made in the People's Republic of China," the export wording of that decade, and the black borders and calligraphy match Jingdezhen export ware of the same years. The two share identical seals, so they left the same workshop as a set.

Jingdezhen, the porcelain city of Jiangxi. The larger poem reads, in part, "Luoyang in the third month, the spring light is fine; birds sing on the branch and keep the flowers company" — Luoyang, the city famous for peonies. The smaller answers: "Bright spring light, birdsong and the scent of flowers." The pair was designed to be read together and is offered that way, both stands included.