Page 7 - September 21 2021 Curtis collections snuff bottles Bonhams NYC

Emily Byrne Curtis lecturing at the ICSBS
Convention, New Orleans, 1980

Emily Byrne Curtis (1940-2020)

Emily Byrne Curtis, a native of New York City, and later mercantile and technological interactions where she explored
Hoboken, New Jersey, began collecting snuff bottles as an as her subject lenses, spectacles, aventurine glass, and
extension of an early interest in Chinese art that led to serious windows found in China in the sixteenth century. She
academic research. She became an independent scholar discusses their technological development from glassworks in
and author in the field of Chinese glass, enamels and snuff Murano, Venice, the significance of Venice’s commerce with
bottles. Her research was partly funded by grants from The China and, gifts of glass from the Vatican to the Kangxi and
Educational Fund of The International Chinese Snuff Bottle Yongzheng emperor, using many documents from the Rome
Society in 1989 and the Pacific Cultural Foundation, Taipei, and Vatican archives. Her most recent publication came in
Taiwan, in 1991. 2019, Chinese-Islamic Works of Art, 1644-1912: A Study of
Some Qing Dynasty Examples which focuses on works of
She was a prolific author. Her publications include Reflected Chinese-Islamic art from the late seventeenth century to the
Glory in a Bottle: Chinese Snuff Bottle Portraits (1980), present day. It examines glass wares which were probably
considered her best known and most beloved book by made for a local Chinese-Muslim clientele and provides a
snuff bottle aficionados. This work, the culmination of years fascinating window into this mix of traditional Chinese and
of intensive research, links known photographs of Chinese Muslim craft traditions.
subjects from royalty to the stage with subjects of inside-
painted bottles primarily from the hand of Ma Shaoxuan. The Her essays on Chinese glass have appeared in wide-
book illustrates the web of convoluted relationships during one ranging publications from the ‘Palace Museum Journal’,
of China’s most tumultuous periods,1890-1930, during China’s Beijing and the ‘Journal of Glass Studies’, Corning, New
struggle to move into the modern age, and focuses upon York; to the Transactions of the Oriental Ceramic Society,
many famous statesmen, ministers, and diplomats. It includes London. The subjects of her numerous essays and lectures,
a chapter on the ‘Peking’ theater, introducing the leading given at symposiums and conventions at universities and
actors of the day. institutions around the world, mostly on the topic of glass,
included ‘Jesuit Kilian Stumpf at Kangxi’s court, 1695-1720’;
In her book, Pure Brightness Chinese Everywhere: The Glass ‘French Missionary Records for the Kangxi Emperor’s Glass
of China (2004), she covers the development of glass in China Workshop’; ‘Jesuit Pierre d’Incarville: A Glassmaking Botanist
from the Warring States (475-221 BC) to the Qing dynasty at Qianlong’s Court’; a ‘Botanical Exchange: The Emperor
(1644-1911). Using archival materials in China, as well as Likes Flowers’; ‘Chinese Glass: A Present to His Czarish
Western missionary letters and documents, she supplies Majesty’; ‘Yongzheng Glass: Elegant Forms’; ‘Plan of the
important new information on glass manufacture in the Emperor’s Glassworks’ and ‘Chinese Glass and the
Qing dynasty. In 2009, she published a further study, Glass Vatican Records’.
exchange between Europe and China, 1550-1800 : diplomatic,