Christie's Amsterdam — Christies Amsterdam: Fine and Important Late Ming and Transitional Porcelain, The private collection of Captain Michael Hatcher, selected from the contents of an Asiatic vessels, which went down in the South China Sea circa 1640, 14 February 1985

Book Good No Jacket Christie's Amsterdam English text; Paperback; 17.5 x 24 cm; 0.2 kg; 51 pages with colour and black and white illustrations. 226 lots; Includes loose price list, which shows some yellowing and wear marks throughout.; Used with signs of wear. The exterior show edge wear, scuffs and scratches on the front cover, spine and back cover. Interior with some yellowing, one loose page and pen written numbers near some lots. The loose page is worn on the right side.; VERY HARD TO FIND.;"The fame of the Hatcher collection spread, when over two thousand porcelains of the Transitional Period, which covers the years between 1620 and 1682, were sold in March 1984, for between three and ten times their estimated values. Most interested people did not know then that only a part of the total number of pieces, twenty-three thousand approximately, which Captain Hatcher of Singapore had salvaged from a depth of 40 meters in the South China Sea, had changed hands. When another eighteen thousand pieces were auctioned only three months after, predictions were that prices could not hold. But they remained high and very high. Lot 315, the cover to a barrel-shaped jar painted with a cyclical date corresponding to 1643 and estimated at f 300 and f 500, went for f 17.000. When the first Hatcher-pieces had been on sale in Amsterdam, no one had yet recognised this material's importance. This quickly changed. The last pieces of the recovery, originally held back as a private collection, are now on offer. As a whole, the recovery strikingly illustrates the variety of Transitional productions and the diverse qualities of porcelain China produced and exported around 16-40-1650. The largest number was of luxury items, mostly small-sized for instance in the form of wine-cups, tea-bowls and stem-bowls, vases, covered boxes and the like. Larger items included dishes and bowls as one might have used them for food at table. covered jars and bottles, kendi's, tea- and wine-pots, censers, urinals, even night-lights. Many pieces were carefully shaped and painted. Though some were glazed monochrome or overglaze polychrome, a vast majority was blue-white. Considering the fact that these porcelains had laid in silt and salt for more than three hundred years, and that they had been recovered from fair depths, they were in surprisingly good condition. Once all these pieces are dispersed, it will be important to recall what they looked like as an assemblage, and to have them available in public collections. In Holland, some are already displayed in musea. The catalogues which describe them (7 December 1983, 14 March and 12-13 June 1984, and 14 February 1985 respectively) are important background for anyone concerned with the study of wares of this type." introduction by Dr. Barbara Harrison, Director of the Municipal Museum Princessehof, Leeuwarden.