FEATURES ARCHIVE

The Sze Yuan Tang Bronzes, collected over the last third of the 20th century by Anthony Hardy and now to be sold in New York on 16 September, go back to a period in Chinese history which, as he described it to me, was ‘a very foggy and mysterious era.  Our knowledge is slowly being expanded and it was only recently that scholars recognised that there was an earlier period than the Shang dynasty (circa 16th -11th centuries B.C.), the Golden Age during which most of the bronzes in my collection were produced.’

One of the bronzes in the collection, a gui food vessel from a slightly later period, the Western Zhou (c. 1100 – 771 B.C.), provides fresh information about the lost culture of the State of Kai. It bears an inscription on the interior which reads, ‘on the phase of the l0th moon, the Yu Rong launched a massive attack on the state of Kai….’.  The inscription goes on to detail the substantial rewards offered by Kai Hou (probably the marquis) to Hai who defeated the enemy and who then had the gui specifically cast so that it could serve as a sacrificial vessel in rites honouring Kai Zhong.  As Anthony Hardy describes it, ‘this is a tantalising glimpse of a faraway, lost period in Chinese history.’

Collecting archaic bronzes of the Shang dynasty became very fashionable in the West at the beginning of the 20th Century when German American and Swedish engineers, building railways across China, unearthed Shang bronzes whose sophistication and diamond-sharp casting caught the imagination of such eminent collectors as the King of Sweden and his circle.  But times and collecting fashions change and when in the early 1950’s Anthony Hardy’s father, who collected mainly medieval European art, came home one evening with a ‘beautiful jue ritual tripod wine vessel,  the collecting of Chinese archaic bronzes was in decline.’  But Anthony Hardy says ‘the scarcity wasn’t a bad thing. Few objects were available on the open market at the time I started collecting in the 1970’s, when I went to live in Hong Kong to work in the shipping business, so the only way to acquire such bronzes was from dealers who had them in stock or who had bought them from old collections or at auction.  I am glad this is how I started, because this resulted in wonderful provenances for all the bronzes I purchased, and this is especially important today.’

The exceptional bronzes illustrated here from the collection were employed by the Shang ruling class for ritual offerings of food and wine to invoke the aid of ancestral spirits.  ‘I think that the probable likelihood is that the most important bronzes were in the hands of kings and princes’ Anthony Hardy explains, ‘There was no such thing as an emperor of China in the Shang period. Some of the pictograms cast on the bronzes probably represented warrior tribes or clans, and thus are extremely important.’

During his many years as a collector, Anthony Hardy became ‘mesmerized by, and then hooked on, the later pre-Anyang phase of the Shang dynasty – the Erligang (c. 1500 B.C.) and subsequent periods (to c. 1400 B.C.).  These’, he explained, ‘led to a fascination with the high Anyang period (1300 – 1027 B.C.) of technical mastery, ritual significance and mysterious symbolism, so I decided to concentrate on bronzes from this period of artistic excellence.’

The wine vessel (lot 808) Anthony Hardy’s father had brought home one evening half a century before was, of all the things he collected, his favourite piece and it inspired his son to form this world-class collection of bronzes from the dawn of civilisation.