Page 100 - Bonhams Chinese Art March 2016 New York

8144
A FINE CINNABAR LACQUER SQUARE BRUSHPOT, BITONG
Qianlong four-character mark and of the period
Finely incised through deep layers of bright cinnabar lacquer with a continuous landscape
scene across the four sides and chamfered corners depicting travelers greeting a farming
boy riding a buffalo, a contemplative scholar accompanied by a servant with a qin, a
gentleman cooling himself with a fan beside two boys playing and another scholar and boy
traversing a low bridge, all in an intricately conceived idealized landscape of pine and wutong
groves, rocky mountains and rivers stretching into far vistas, a narrow key-fret border carved
immediately below the replacement yellow metal mount to the rim and repeated above the
black lacquered base with three of four surviving low feet surrounding the incised mark at the
center colored with gilt pigment.
5 3/8in (13.6cm) high
$10,000 - 15,000

清乾隆 剔紅仕人山水圖筆筒 《乾隆年製》金漆楷書款

Provenance
A private Denver, Colorado collection
Henry White Warren (1831-1912), Methodist Episcopal bishop and co-founder of the Iliff
School of Theology in Denver, Colorado, by repute

For comparable cinnabar lacquer brush pots in the Qing Court Collection, see Gugong
Bowuyuan Cang Wenwu Zhenpin Quanji 46: Qingdai Qiqi (The Complete Collection of the
Treasures of the Palace Museum 46: Lacquer Wares of the Qing Dynasty), the first a five-
lobed brush pot with flowers, imperial poems and similar key-fret bands to the edges, as
Qianlong period, no. 23, pp.36-37; and a square-sectioned example with canted corners
and figures in landscapes framed by a key-fret border, no. 42, pp. 62-63. See also a similar
gilt four-character mark carved to the base of a red lacquer box displaying a hundred
children at play, no. 19, pp. 18-29.

A closely related lacquer brushpot, dated to the Qianlong period, is in The Metropolitan
Museum of Art, New York, accession number 13.100.147, acquired with the John Stewart
Kennedy Fund, 1913. It is interesting to note the close similarity of deeply incised carving
styles and subject matter: the museum brushpot also depicts a scholar and a boy with a
qin, gentlemen and boys relaxing, and travelers amid groves and rivers, although the four
scenes are contained within cartouches framed by foliate scrolls. The subject matter of both
the present lot and the museum example exhibit the fascination of the scholarly class with
the Daoist ideal of retirement from public service to dwell in the mountains and contemplate
nature. As such it would have provided a means of brief escape and relaxation from his
Confucian duties for scholar-official whose desk it adorned.

Another related lacquer brushpot dated to the Qianlong period sold at Sotheby’s Hong Kong,
8 April 2010, sale HK0323, lot 1931.

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