- Title
- Bowl
- Date Made
- 9th century
- Medium
- Earthenware, painted in blue on an opaque white glaze
- Dimensions
- 2 1/2 x 8 in. (6.35 x 20.32 cm)
- Accession Number
- M.73.5.133
- Collecting Area
- Art of the Middle East: Islamic
- Curatorial Notes
Chinese ceramics have been excavated at a variety of sites throughout the early Islamic empire of the ‘Abbasid caliphate, with its capital at Baghdad, signifying a taste for these costly imported wares that clearly extended beyond the court. In order to satisfy that predilection, Iraqi potters in the ninth century began to imitate the whiteness of high-fired porcelain by covering low-fired earthenware with an opaque white glaze of tin oxide. Whereas the originals had a pure white surface, the examples made in Iraq feature inscriptions or geometric and vegetal designs painted on the raw glazed surface in copper green, manganese purple, or most commonly, as here, in cobalt blue, which was fixed in a single firing.
