Page 197 - Important Chinese Art Hong Kong Sotheby's April 2017

This unique snuff bottle, enamelled on copper at the Palace
Workshops, Beijing, is of superlative quality, with its high
quality decoration of a garden scene with carefully conceived
use of space, all framed amidst elaborate borders. It is similar
to other Qianlong mark and period enamelled copper bottles
from the Qing court collection, preserved in the Palace
Museum, Beijing, including another white-ground bottle
enamelled with a scene of flowers and birds, illustrated in Snuff hand. The grassy ground is completely filled with detail,
Bottles - The Complete Collection of Treasures of the Palace
Museum, vol. 47, Hong Kong, 2003, p. 93, no. 143. However,
it is most closely related to another example, formerly in the
Gerry Mack and J & J collections, illustrated in Moss, Graham,
Tsang, The Art of the Chinese Snuff Bottle, The J & J Collection, without any hint of calligraphic line. It is painted to provide
vol. 1, New York and Tokyo, 1993, no. 177, and sold at Christie’s a realistic two-dimensional, logically shaded, Western
New York, 29 March 2006, lot 6, and again at Christie’s Hong
Kong, 7th October 2014, lot 11, from a private American
collection.
However, although it shares distinct characteristics with the
J & J bottle, both with the same distinctive borders enclosing
the garden scenes,and with the white spaces skilfully washed
in places with blue to suggest sky, there are several key
differences. The J & J bottle is typically Chinese in its style.
The rocks, like the tree trunk, are painted with vigorous,
calligraphic lines, and the scene is speckled with traditional
Chinese dotting to provide texture as much as to suggest moss
and rough bark on rocks and trees, respectively, and the lines
of the leaves are as much an exercise in brushwork as they
are in depiction. On the current bottle, they are a little more
subdued, more detailed and more descriptive than expressive,
suggesting, perhaps, greater European influence.
This impression is confirmed by other elements of the design.
The roses, seen from the front on one side, from the back
on the other, are typically European, the one from the front
resembling a heraldic Elizabethan rose in its formal layout. It
is unusual for a Chinese artist working in enamels to depict a
flower from the back. Front, side, or three-quarter views are
more common in this art. There are other signs of a European
including texturing to represent short grass, with blades of
taller grass around the base of the rock. A Chinese designer
would have been more likely to have made it simpler and
less detailed. The rock is also very European in its depiction,
impression of a three-dimensional object.
Confirmation of a European hand may also be found in the
lower decorative border, where an unusual configuration
of the standard formalised lingzhi design appears, with the
usual trefoil upper register, balanced, or rather unbalanced
in Chinese terms, by a lower register of different shape,
resembling more the standard head of a ruyi sceptre. This use
of two different registers of formalized fungus is exceptional.
It appears on one other example from the collection of Mary
and George Bloch, sold in these rooms, 27th May 2013, lot 212,
beneath the lip and above the shoulder band.
IMPORTANT CHINESE ART 195