Bowl with Masked Dancing Figure

White, curving horns appear to sprout from the red head of the enigmatic figure whose outstretched arms and running legs fill the contours of this bowl. Perhaps a bull’s head is represented, but the blurring of the black pigment in the glaze has obscured the artist’s intentions here and elsewhere. The rendering of the hands is equally ambiguous, possibly meant to suggest the thumb and knuckles of a clenched fist. The hand reaching backward appears to hold a leafy branch. The space around the figure is filled with a miscellany of motifs, including a flower, a palmette, fragmentary letters in Kufic script, and a bird. Groups of four or five short lines divide the rim into five sections, colored either green or yellow.
This bowl closely resembles figural wares with buff-colored bodies reported by Charles Wilkinson to have come from excavations at Nishapur. Here, however, the off-white background is obtained from slip covering a reddish ceramic fabric, and the yellow background results from staining from fine chromite particles, rather than the more customary lead-tin or lead-antimony. The base, which is slightly concave and beveled, is only partially covered by the slip. The bowl, once broken, is in good condition, having been put back together from at least four major fragments. On the interior, overpainting is largely limited to the center: the figure’s collar and shoulders, his groin, and the upper lapels of his torso.