A Ming blue-and-white porcelain jar and cover. Comprising an ovoid potiche with rounded shoulder, set round which are four pierced lion-mask lugs, with short neck and thickened lip; unglazed, recessed base. The low, domed cover has a brass ball finial, which, perhaps following breakage to the porcelain finial, was, probably in either the eighteenth or nineteenth century, encased in European brass, the addition fixed by a screw drilled through the porcelain and secured by a nut.

Painted in a broad band round the body are four upright, pointed panels, with lotus or peony growing by rocks, reserved in a ground of key-fret over a blue ground, separated by upright white bands painted with ruyi-heads, with a band of lotus-petal panels at the foot below. In a band round the shoulder on the same key-fret ground are four quatrefoil cartouches with cranes among clouds, with a tendril scroll border round the neck. The cover, matching the shoulder, but with flower-spray cartouches, does not belong to this jar.

A similar jar in the Royal Collection (RCIN 10756) was noted at St James's Palace in 1910.

Text adapted from Chinese and Japanese Works of Art in the Collection of Her Majesty The Queen: Volume I.