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Dish of saucer shape with a channel foot ring and out-turned rim, the base with a lozenge mark in a double ring. Decorated with an imposing mountainous landscape, a river, houses, a man in a boat, one on a bridge and flights of birds. The back with three bamboo sprays.
The channel footring, a characteristic of large dishes from the mid 17th century through the early Kangxi period, is a double footring. It may have been connected with the use of ring stands for displaying the porcelain. The design on this dish is very powerful. The rocks are emphasized by dark outlines and their massiveness has been rendered with many curved parallel small lines suggestive of a Master of the Rocks style. The highly individual manner of rendering the rocks on this particular dish is known from a number of other objects. The figures are tiny compared to the impressive landscape, which is a convention also encountered in Chinese landscape painting. Very small figures are almost always present to convey the insignificance of man in relationship to nature. The rim of the dish is moth-eaten, a characteristic of early Kangxi dishes where the brown rims have been disregarded. A similar dish is in the Butler family collection.
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