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All auctions / Porcelain & Pottery / Two Gran Chiriqui Bichrome Pottery Jars
Pre-Columbian, Costa Rica or Panama, Gran Chiriqui. A pair of round-bottomed earthenware jars, each with a swelling globular body rising to a short flaring collar and fitted with modeled zoomorphic lug handles at the rim. The larger vessel preserves both creatures, crouching alert with incised limbs and muzzles pressed against the shoulder, while the smaller retains one handle and part of the second animal. Both surfaces carry red and cream slip, applied in broad bands and panels across a buff clay body and softened by firing clouds. Vessels of this class served domestic storage and serving functions in the Diquis and Chiriqui river valleys, though comparable examples recovered from cemetery contexts suggest a secondary role as grave furniture, accompanying the dead with the household goods of the living. "Gran Chiriqui" is an archaeological culture area rather than a single people, spanning the Diquis delta and Terraba drainage of southern Costa Rica and the Chiriqui highlands of western Panama. Its ceramic sequence is defined largely by surface treatment: red-slipped and bichrome wares, tripod and pedestal supports, and applique adornos in the shape of frogs, crocodilians, felines, and armadillos. The animal lugs on vessels like these are rarely naturalistic portraits; they compress a creature into a few decisive gestures of the modeling tool, and the same shorthand appears in the region's celebrated cast gold pendants. Frogs and crocodilians dominate the repertoire, and both carried associations with water, fertility, and transformation across the Isthmo-Colombian world. Item # 204288
Estimate:£226.18
To the auctionView all items fromArtemis Fine ArtsorPorcelain & Pottery
Estimate:
£226.18
RÖRSTRAND. MAT, KAFFE-OCH TESERVIS. "SWEDISH GRACE", 99 DELAR.
09/29/2026
£112.98
Est: £151.49
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MEDLEM AV SVENSKA BYGDEKVARNARNAS RIKSFÖRBUND, emaljskylt.
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£41.42
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TERRIN på FOT, porslin, "Perlrand", Rosenthal, Tyskland.
09/29/2026
£26.36
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SIGVARD BERNADOTTE (SVERIGE, 1907–2002). Kaffekoppar med fat, 8 st
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£112.98
Est: £189.36
