Page 182 - Bonhams May 12 16 London

THE ATTERBURY JADE BUFFALO
Carol Michaelson
The Atterbury jade buffalo is a very impressive and imposing
sculpture, worked from a generous sized piece of grey-green jade
and its confident stance epitomizes the skill of the jade craftsman
who made it. It is also one of a small, select group of magnificent
jade buffaloes and horses, dating most likely to the late Ming to mid
Qing period, many of which are well known carvings in well-known
collections.
The buffalo was one of the animals appearing in jade as early as the
Shang dynasty (BC1500-1050) as three dimensional sculpture, where
it was usually depicted as a very tame creature reclining on four
legs, with its two pointed horns curving back horizontally from the
forehead. (The British Museum has several examples in its collection
dating to this period).* Buffaloes and oxen were important sacrificial
animals and their scapulae were used in ancient oracle bone
divination. They are used in the traditional methods of agriculture, as
dairy animals, and even occasionally for their meat. The dung of the
buffalo is a good fertilizer and when dried, it can be used as a fuel in what purpose these large creatures were first carved. They do not
households. These animals are also used to carry heavy loads and
are maintained as pack animals.
Water buffaloes therefore came to be regarded as symbols of the
countryside and the simple rustic life that was idealized by many
Chinese scholars and government officials. Jade sculptures of water
buffalo became especially popular at a later period during the late
Ming and Qing dynasties as increasing numbers of people left their
rural homes and flocked to the cities in search of richer economic
and cultural opportunities. Most late Ming and Qing water buffalo
sculptures depict the beast lying contentedly at rest, indicating that
the world was at peace. Some buffalo were also shown holding rice
grains in their mouths suggesting a good harvest. Several sculptures
also depict small boys acting as cowherds riding or leading the
buffalo which might indicate an auspicious wish for lots of sons and
good harvests.
Buffaloes are also recorded as having an important role in certain
imperial ceremonies during the Ming and Qing dynasties, particularly
in Beijing in the third lunar month, when the emperor personally
ploughed three furrows within the grounds of the Temple of
Agriculture, (Xiannongtan) where he made sacrifices to the god of
Agriculture. This annual ceremony was meant to mark the beginning
of the agricultural year and ensure a good harvest. Various emperors
of the Qing dynasty were depicted in paintings and in manuals, such
as the Gengzhi tu (Pictures of Agriculture and Sericulture), in rural
type clothing and directing a plough.
A DATING CONUNDRUM
The traditional dating of these buffaloes has been assigned to the late
Ming period, possibly during the transitional period between the Ming
and the Qing, mid-17th century. Jessica Rawson in her catalogue of
the Hotung collection, Chinese Jades from the Neolithic to the Qing,
London, 1995, referred to these large jade animals as belonging to
a small and relatively distinct group of creatures, mainly horses and
buffaloes, carved on a larger scale than was general for animals in
jade. Further, she said they are all in the same range of green opaque
tones of different shades. In the absence of comparable material to
date these figures precisely she recorded that for the moment the
traditional date of the Ming to Qing transition should be adopted, as
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has been done for the Atterbury buffalo.
Most jade carvings before the 17th-18th centuries were relatively
small, their size being restricted by the size of the pebbles from which
they were carved. The Chinese invented gunpowder sometime in
the 10th century AD and this led to their having the ability to mine
jade at source in the mountains, resulting in larger boulders of jade
becoming available for working. The earliest three-dimensional jade
animals were around maximum 10cm in length or height but from the
time of the mining of jade this size increased incrementally though
certainly not for quite some time and this was probably due to the
lack of access by the Chinese to the jade producing sites in Central
Asia. Sometime during the end of the Ming and the first hundred
years or so of the Qing, the emergence of really large jade animals,
whose measurements reached around 40cm in length, seem first to
appear.
There is no direct evidence to help us define precisely when and for
fit in with the main group of animals of much smaller format and the
grey-green stone of several of them is not typical of the Qing period.
The first Qing emperor and the second, Kangxi (1662-1722) did
not develop a particular interest in jade and increasing domestic
unrest threatened the jade supply that came mainly from Xinjiang
and this hampered the resumption of jade craft working. The
Yongzheng emperor (1723-35) had to struggle to obtain raw jade
from Xinjiang so by 1736 jade workers at the imperial jade workshop
had crafted relatively few new objects. They seem mostly to have
worked on modifying the shapes and designs of older pieces and
adding inscriptions to them. Dramatic changes only seemed to have
happened during the reign of the Qianlong emperor (1736-95).
It has been said many times that the almost eccentric choice of the
grey-green material for these buffalos, and a group of horses which
seem to be tied into this same group, might fit in best with a late
Ming date. (Both the Hotung and Woolf collections have horses of
this same colouring). The conundrum, however, is that the masculine
strength, elegance and simplicity of the sculpting are perhaps more
in tune with the stylistic principles of the Kangxi reign whereas the
supply of such jade was more likely to have come in the Qianlong
period after that emperor’s conquest of Dzungaria gave him direct
access to the jade producing area of Xinjiang province.
The belief that this select group might have been produced in the
late Ming or earlier is founded on a remark that Raphael made when
bequeathing his buffalo and a similarly sized horse to the Fitzwilliam
Museum. Raphael said that Dr Bushell, the ceramics scholar, had
seen them in a corridor of the Winter Palace in Beijing and that they
were according to Bushell brought there from Nanjing by the Yongle
emperor at the time of the transfer of the capital to Beijing in 1421.
According to Bushell the jades were alleged to have dated from the
Han dynasty and the story contains other and more fantastic details,
but if their association with the Yongle emperor (1403-1424) were a
fact they would be at least as early as the 15th century which is highly
improbable as so few other similarly large jades exist from that time.
(S. Howard Hansford, records this incident in Chinese Carved Jades,
London, 1968, p.93).
The Qianlong emperor’s patronage of jade and the expansion of the
imperial workshop were prime factors in the flourishing of jade art