Celadon Crackle Glaze Porcelain Table Lamp in Chinese Style with Scroll Handles

Antique Chinese green celadon table lamp: a porcelain vase of bottle form with twin scroll handles mounted as a table lamp, crackled overall, on a turned hardwood base with a patinated brass top, newly rewired and paired with a new white pleated silk lampshade. The full, rounded body swells from a neatly finished foot and tapers into a tall waisted neck that flares to a wide everted lip. Flanking the neck is a pair of applied scroll handles, each drawn upward in a supple S-curve and finished in a tight pierced coil — a device borrowed from archaic Chinese bronze vessels and carried into the Longquan celadon vases of the Song dynasty, from which this shape descends. The glaze is beautiful. A pale, cool sea-green celadon, that pools slightly at the foot and along the underside of the lip, deepening there to a soft jade tone. Across the entire surface runs a dense, deliberate crackle. Crackle glaze — kaipian in Chinese — began as a firing accident, the result of glaze and clay body contracting at different rates as they cooled. Potters at the Guan and Ge kilns learned to court that accident rather than avoid it, and to rub the resulting fissures with pigment so the network reads as a drawn web across the surface. On this vase the crackle is fine, irregular and beautifully distributed, its lines stained charcoal and grey-brown, so that the celadon glaze changes character entirely depending on whether you look at it from across a room or from arm's length. From a distance the vase reads as a quiet monochrome; up close it is intricate detailed.