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Lot Essay
This color of nephrite is of a type widely used by the Suzhou workshops. The lack of a footrim, another feature of this school, indicates a probable Suzhou provenance. For further discussion see Hugh Moss, Victor Graham and Ka Bo Tsang, The Art of the Chinese Snuff Bottle, The J & J Collection, Tokyo, 1993, pp. 114-115, no. 54.
See Rachelle R. Holden, op. cit., p. 269, where the author quotes lines from the late Yuan early Ming poet Gao Qi (1336-1374), which describe rainclouds, tides and mountains which fittingly could be used to describe the scene on this bottle:
'Clouds come and clouds go, but the mountains
remain the same, the tide falls and the tide
rises, but the river flows on unheeding...
The immemorial nature of river and mountains will
never be exhausted, while men come and men
return, their heads inevitably growing white.'
See, also, Hugh Moss, Victor Graham and Ka Bo Tsang, A Treasury of Chinese Snuff Bottles, The Mary and George Bloch Collection, Hong Kong, 1995, pp. 100-101, no. 38, for a slender rounded rectangular bottle with relief seal script carved to the sides but using a similar stone, where the authors note, "Because of their prominence as the principal decoration they tend to overshadow another delightful feature of the bottle, the unusual material and its evocative markings. The material can be placed in a broad group of plain black-and-white jade bottles with natural, albeit very abstract designs. As such it is one of the finest of them... the markings evoke a powerful abstract ink-painting of a gorge with waterfalls, which can be read in a number of different ways, all of them immensely satisfying as pictorial art within the Chinese tradition."
See Rachelle R. Holden, op. cit., p. 269, where the author quotes lines from the late Yuan early Ming poet Gao Qi (1336-1374), which describe rainclouds, tides and mountains which fittingly could be used to describe the scene on this bottle:
'Clouds come and clouds go, but the mountains
remain the same, the tide falls and the tide
rises, but the river flows on unheeding...
The immemorial nature of river and mountains will
never be exhausted, while men come and men
return, their heads inevitably growing white.'
See, also, Hugh Moss, Victor Graham and Ka Bo Tsang, A Treasury of Chinese Snuff Bottles, The Mary and George Bloch Collection, Hong Kong, 1995, pp. 100-101, no. 38, for a slender rounded rectangular bottle with relief seal script carved to the sides but using a similar stone, where the authors note, "Because of their prominence as the principal decoration they tend to overshadow another delightful feature of the bottle, the unusual material and its evocative markings. The material can be placed in a broad group of plain black-and-white jade bottles with natural, albeit very abstract designs. As such it is one of the finest of them... the markings evoke a powerful abstract ink-painting of a gorge with waterfalls, which can be read in a number of different ways, all of them immensely satisfying as pictorial art within the Chinese tradition."