A MOLDED POTTERY 'WELCOMING FIGURE' PANEL Song/Jin dynasty, 12th centuryA MOLDED POTTERY 'WELCOMING FIGURE' PANELSong/Jin dynasty, 12th centuryA young lady holds the doorway open as if waiting for someone's return, her hair neatly drawn and wearing a floral-shaped diadem, the massive door panels with raised bosses suggesting a grand mansion beyond, the thick rectangular brick made of grey pottery, roughly finished on the back with impressed open palm-print of a human hand. 17in (43.2cm) high; 14 1/2in (36.8cm) wide宋/金 《美人倚門》陶磚Published:Harris, "As Virus Tightens Grip on China, the Art World Feels the Squeeze," The New York Times, February 13, 2020出版：哈里斯，"As Virus Tightens Grip on China, the Art World Feels the Squeeze," 《紐約時報》，2020 年 2 月 13 日The imagery of a 'lady in a doorway' first appeared as a popular subject in Song dynasty poetry and paintings. It also became part of the funerary decoration when the Song and Jin people in northern China developed a unique practice of surrounding the burial chamber with architecture facades. Compare the two Song dynasty brick panels similarly molded with a 'lady in a doorway' unearthed in Baisha, Henan province, illustrated by Su Bai in Baisha Song mu (A Brief Description of the Three Song Dynasty Tombs Excavated at Bai-sha), Beijing, 2002, pl. 30, with a group of illustrations of additional examples on the same subject on p. 42.Compare also a pair of molded panels of the same subject, in the collection of the Kaifeng Museum, illustrated in Temporal Living and Elegant Life in Song Dynasty: Cultural Relics Exhibition in Song Dynasty, Beijing, 2022, p. 15.An architectural set of carved pottery panels centered with a 'lady in a doorway' excavated in 2005 at Duanjiazhuang, Qinyuan, Shanxi province is illustrated in the China Institute exhibition catalog Theater, Life, and the Afterlife: Tomb Décor of the Jin Dynasty from Shanxi, Beijing, 2012, pp. 48-49, no. 1, attributed to the 12th Century.Architectural panels like the present example were sometimes made of carved stone. See the carved sandstone panel depicting a young servant in a doorway from the tomb of Yang Can, attributed to the Chunyou period (A.D. 1241-1252) of the Southern Song dynasty, excavated in Yong'an county, Zunyi, Guizhou province, illustrated in Zhongguo meishu quanji, diaosu bian 5: Wudai Song diaosu (Compendium of Chinese Art: Sculptures Vol. 5, Five Dynasties and Song Sculptures), Beijing, 1988, no. 163.The thermoluminescence test result is consistent with the dating of the piece, Oxford certificate number C108w50.