During London Auction Week last month, a luminous Jun sky-blue-glazed bowl exceeded expectations at Bonhams, fetching £1.01 million (US$1.28 million) – a result that quickly became a talking point among Chinese art collectors.
Most recently, during Paris Auction Week, the auction house presented another rarity: a Ge mallow-shaped tripod washer, dated to the Song/Yuan dynasties (960-1368). Presented as a single-lot sale, the piece drew spirited bidding and ultimately realized €1.38 million (US$1.49 million).
The washer came from the private collection of Elsa Peretti, the visionary Italian designer who transformed Tiffany & Co. with her sculptural, minimalist jewelry. Her most iconic creations included the Bone Cuff, Bean, Diamonds by the Yard, and Open Heart – all widely recognized as modern classics.
Elsa Peretti with her iconic Bone Cuff bracelet | Image © Tiffany & Co.
Lot 1 | A Ge mallow-shaped brush washer | Property of the Nando and Elsa Peretti Foundation
Song/Yuan Dynasty
Diameter: 21 cm
Provenance (Supplemented by The Value):
- The property of a Gentleman
- Christie’s Hong Kong, 31 October 1994, lot 528
- Sotheby’s London, 13 July 2005, lot 149 (Sold: £1,128,000)
- Collection of Elsa Peretti (1940-2021)
Estimate: €1,200,000 - 1,500,000
Hammer Price: €1,100,000
Sold: €1,379,400
Auction House: Bonhams Paris
Sale: Profound Beauty: The Elsa Peretti Brush Washer
Date: 11 June 2025
The brush washer was last seen at auction in 2005, when it sold at Sotheby’s London for £1.128 million (then around US$2 million). It was acquired by Peretti, who kept it in her secluded home in a medieval village in Catalonia until her passing in 2021, at the age of 80. The washer was consigned to Bonhams Paris by the Nando and Elsa Peretti Foundation, which she established in memory of her father.
Bidding opened at €800,000. After six bids, the hammer fell at €1.1 million, with a final price of €1.379 million, including premium. The winning bidder – paddle number undisclosed – was represented by Jing Wen, an administrator for Asian Art in Paris, who bid via phone.
The auctioneer brought the gavel down at €1.1 million
Elsa Peretti’s residence in Catalonia
Elsa Peretti was born in Florence in 1940, the youngest daughter of a prominent businessman who founded one of Italy’s leading oil companies. At twenty-one, she left behind a life of privilege to pursue independence, working as a French teacher and ski instructor in Switzerland before studying interior design and moving to Milan. In 1964, she arrived in the city that would shape her creative spirit: Barcelona.
There, Peretti became immersed in the Gauche Divine, a vibrant cultural movement that used art as a form of resistance to Franco’s regime. As a model for celebrated Catalan photographers such as Colita and Leopoldo Pomés, she was soon introduced to Salvador Dalí – an inspirational figure who opened her eyes to surrealism and the power of composition.
The Catalan aesthetic left a lasting imprint on Peretti’s design language. The sinuous, organic forms of Antoni Gaudí’s architecture became enduring sources of inspiration. With that same free-spirited creativity, she began developing the earliest prototypes of her jewelry designs.
Elsa Peretti photographed at her Catalonian residence
The Ge ware tripod washer surrounded by Elsa Peretti’s iconic creations, including the Open Heart and Snake collections
In 1968, Peretti moved to New York, bringing with her a wealth of artistic influences. She began modeling for Giorgio di Sant’Angelo, who featured her sterling silver bottle pendant – worn with a fresh gardenia – on the runway during a fashion show. The success was immediate.
Around this time, she met Halston, the American designer who became her lifelong friend and most fervent supporter. It was Halston who encouraged her to pursue jewelry design in earnest. In 1974, she joined Tiffany & Co., and her debut collection sold out on its first day.
From that moment, Peretti transformed the landscape of jewelry and design. She reintroduced silver as a noble material, elevating it to the realm of fine jewelry. With her Diamonds by the Yard collection, she redefined how diamonds could be worn – elegantly casual, layered with jeans, or paired with evening gowns – making fine jewelry both accessible and empowering for women who could now buy it for themselves.
Today, her creations are widely recognized as icons of 20th-century design. They are housed in the permanent collections of the British Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.
While creating her iconic designs for Tiffany & Co., Elsa Peretti was also restoring the medieval village of Sant Martí Vell – a tranquil Catalan hamlet abandoned after the Spanish Civil War. Over the decades, it became her sanctuary between frequent travels to New York, Asia, and beyond – and a home to objects of art from the Orient, Oceania, and Africa. It was here that this Ge ware brush washer quietly resided.
Ranked among the Five Famous Wares of the Song dynasty, Ge ware was exceptionally rare and coveted by the imperial court, later admired and collected by emperors of succeeding dynasties. It stands apart for its distinctive crackled glaze, a pattern achieved through the precise manipulation of different rates of shrinkage between glaze and clay body during firing and cooling.
Though technically a flaw, potters of the time mastered the technique, transforming it into a celebrated decorative feature – one of the most poetic accidents in the history of Chinese ceramics. Yet the effect remains largely uncontrolled; the slightest variation in kiln temperature, atmosphere, or placement can alter the outcome. As such, each Ge ware piece is entirely unique.
On this washer, the glaze is unctuous and opaque, with a creamy bluish-grey tone and satiny finish, suffused with a striking network of fine black crackles above an underlying matrix of light golden fissures. The underside bears eight regularly spaced spur marks radiating around a central ninth – each revealing the dark grey body, a hallmark of Ge ware, known as the “iron foot.” These tiny spur marks, left by kiln supports, reflect the exceptional care taken to achieve full glaze coverage.
Drawing inspiration from nature, the present vessel was designed as a functional object for the scholar’s studio – a brush washer used to clean writing or painting brushes during calligraphy or artistic creation. Its mallow flower form was not only visually appealing but purposefully shaped: each lobe offered a gentle curve against which a brush could be wiped in the water held within.
In traditional Chinese culture, refined scholar’s objects were held in higher regard than everyday tableware such as bowls, plates, or even decorative vases and jars. These implements were prized not only for their utility but also for their symbolic resonance and their place in the intellectual life of the literati.
In Chinese symbolism, the mallow was associated with longevity, and with loyalty, as it was believed to turn toward the sun throughout the day, an act seen as a metaphor for imperial devotion.
This harmony between natural form and spiritual meaning is characteristic of Southern Song and Yuan dynasty aesthetics, when artists and scholars alike turned to the natural world as a source of philosophical reflection. Close-up studies of birds and flowers, often rendered in intimate formats, allowed literati-scholars to connect with nature – and to bring its contemplative spirit into their domestic spaces.
Asaph Hyman | Bonhams' Global Head of Chinese Ceramics & Works of Art
A Southern Song/Yuan dynasty Ge foliate dish | Sold for US$1.865 million at Christie’s New York in 2024
“To translate ideas is magic. It takes so long to make a curve, to make sure the curve is done well,” said Elsa Peretti.
Perhaps it was this curvilinear grace – of both form and fissure – that spoke most directly to her sensibility. The soft lobes of the mallow, the spontaneous crackle of the glaze, and the vessel’s quiet purpose all resonate with the sculptural simplicity and reverence for nature seen throughout her work.
The finest surviving examples of Ge ware are housed in the world’s leading institutions, including the Palace Museums in Beijing and Taipei, the British Museum, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Very few remain in private hands.
A notable comparable is the Southern Song/Yuan dynasty Ge foliate dish from the renowned Japanese collector Linyushanren, which sold for US$1.865 million at Christie’s New York in 2024.