Page 38 - 2021 March 15th Fine Chinese Paintings and Works of Art, Bonhams NYC New York

The Metropolitan Museum of New York has a taller though more
slender boulder carving, cut from a very similar dark-toned green and
brown nephrite as ours. The luohan is identified as, possibly Gopaka,
as he holds a feathered fan. He is seated in a grotto carved deeply
from the stone and like our example has foreshortening of the ground
plain by the use of a steep rock shelf upon which he meditates.
The rockwork is similarly carved with wutong or maple, see www.
metmuseum.org / Jades / accession number:21.175.145. The jade
entered the collection in 1921 from the famed Edmund C. Converse
Bequest. The museum suggests a likely date of production in the
latter part of the 18th century sometime after 1757. This was when the
Lot 36 (detail) Qianlong emperor visited the Shengyin Monastery in Hangzhou and
saw a set of sixteen luohan paintings attributed to Guanxiu (832–912),
a monk-artist renowned for his eccentric depictions of Buddhist
adepts. The emperor fell in love with the paintings and commissioned
responses in various media, including jade carvings. Woodblock prints,
PROPERTY OF AN ENGLISH LADY like the eighteenth century catalogue, Guyu tupu depicting similar
themes may also have been used as a reference for the jade carvers.
36
A FINE LARGE RUSSET AND GREEN JADE ‘LUOHAN IN A A comparable boulder from the National Palace Museum, Taipei, dated
GROTTO’ BOULDER to the Qianlong period and depicting Bodhidharma gazing into a grotto
18th Century wall in meditation and inscribed with an Imperial poem by the Qianlong
Carved from one end of a much larger boulder of nephrite jade and emperor, is illustrated in The Refined Taste of the Emperor:Special
covered almost entirely with a dark brown skin thinning in color to Exhibition of Archaic and Pictorial Jades of the Ch’ing Court, Taipei,
reveal the olive-green stone beneath, particularly in the carved areas, 1997, pl. 39.
the stone of vertical oblong profile with one corner edge deeply cut
with a small mountain niche centered by the robed and seated, An 8 inch high boulder carving of Bodhidharma seated in a grotto,
bearded and moustached, louhan Bodhidharma, with eyes closed of similar color but of very different scale to ours, with the central
in meditation, his head covered by a cowl, a waterfall cut from a figure of the luohan taking up about half the height of the carving,
natural fissure in the stone runs nearby and continues under the was offered at Sotheby’s from the Collection of Stephen Junkunc, III,
grotto where he sits, the surrounding craggy rock faces are variously 22 September 2020, lot 213. A very slightly smaller pale green jade
carved in low and high relief with knotty branches with hanging vines example was sold at Bonhams, London, 7 November 2013, lot 115.
and wutong and pine dispersed to the reverse side. For a smaller pale celadon and russet jade boulder of the sixth luohan
7in (17.7cm) high Bodhidharma in a grotto, see Sotheby’s, 23 September 2020, lot 653.

$8,000 - 12,000 A slightly later boulder of a similar dark stone but with less attention
to the quality of the carving and its disposition was sold at Christie’s,
New York, Lacquer, Jade, Bronze, Ink: The Irving Collection, Part II, 21
十八世紀 青玉帶皮羅漢山子 March 2019, lot 1119.

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