Page 117 - Nov 2019 Hong Kong SOtheby's Chinese Art

512

512

AN ENAMELLED WHITE GLASS SNUFF BOTTLE 60年代 傳王習三作料琺瑯萱花圖鼻煙壺
ATTRIBUTED TO WANG XISAN, 1960s 《乾隆年製》款
5.5 cm, 2⅛ in.

PROVENANCE 來源：
Y.F. Yang, Hong Kong, 21st March 1972 (HK$6,000). 同豐行，香港，1972年3月21日（HK$6,000）
The current bottle, exquisitely enamelled with a scene of
butterflies hovering over flowers, a motif for courtship and
love, is likely to be one of forty enamelled bottles created by
Wang Xisan in 1964. The composition of the landscape and
the precise articulation of the enamelling closely matches
that on another enamelled bottle by Wang Xisan illustrated
in Hugh Moss, Victor Graham, Ka Bo Tsang, A Treasury of
Chinese Snuff Bottles, the Mary and George Bloch Collection,
Volume 6, Hong Kong, 2008, pp. 273-275, where the authors Mark
note that, learning from his teacher Ye Bengqi, he used
stocks of enamels held since the eighteenth century in the
Forbidden City, Beijing. This accounts for the similarity to
original Qianlong enamelled bottles.
The reason that he used apocryphal Qianlong marks, as
opposed to his own signatures on his inside-painted bottles
is that this was a standard ‘trade’ mark requested by
Chinese Arts and Crafts Corporation. The aforementioned
bottle was sold at Bonhams Hong Kong, 28th May 2010, lot
52. See also another example from the collection of Ruth and
Carl Barron, sold at Christie’s New York, 13th September
2017, lot 224.
HK$ 30,000-50,000
US$ 3,850-6,400
115