Further images
Of round form, thinly and finely potted with an everted and barbed rim, the steep walls decorated in bright underglaze blue with panels of flowers and bamboo alternating with Buddhist emblems, all framed within double lines, the centre of the interior painted with a simple bird-on-rock motif, the inside walls divided into large and narrow panels with on the large panels fruit sprays and flowering branches with insects, the narrow panels with hanging ribbons, the base glazed and with a Bluett & Sons label.
Literature
For a similar example of this type of 'crowcup' (or kraaikoppen in Dutch), so called because the bird resembles a crow, see Maura Rinaldi, Kraak Porcelain - A Moment in the History of Trade, Bamboo Publishing Ltd, London 1989, pl. 166, p.145.
There is a Kraak crowcup of similar decoration and with deep sides in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum, New York, accession number 19.136.17. It was given to the museum as part of the Rogers Fund in 1919, and is illustrated in A Handbook of Chinese Ceramics (1975) by Suzanne Valenstein, and in Blue and White: Early Japanese Export Ware (1978) by Martin Lerner, both MetPublications.
