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Lot Essay
The inscription is taken from a poem by Liu Han, a native of Changsha who was active during the twelfth century. The line quoted on this bottle is the last line in his poem, Zhong mei ('Planting Plum Trees').
See the footnote to lot 20 for information regarding Suzhou as a major cultural and carving center. Although any lapidary workshop capable of carving jade could produce other hardstone carvings, Suzhou workshops originally earned their reputation for their jade output and there is little evidence of any extensive production of other stones until the first half of the eighteenth century.
See Moss, Graham, Tsang, A Treasury of Chinese Snuff Bottles, Vol. 2, Quartz, no. 365, for a very similar example with an identical inscription. The inscriptions on both these bottles is in the same low relief style found on Zhiting's signed works, and suggests early-eighteenth-century production, with the design conceived as a flat, two-dimensional calligraphic image but raised to a higher plane than that of the ground, as opposed to a more sculptural relief inscription.
As with the Bloch example, this bottle is suffused with a series of fine, moss-like chlorite inclusions concentrated in planes lying roughly parallel to the main sides of the bottle and clearly visible as strong, vertical banding from the narrow sides.
See the footnote to lot 20 for information regarding Suzhou as a major cultural and carving center. Although any lapidary workshop capable of carving jade could produce other hardstone carvings, Suzhou workshops originally earned their reputation for their jade output and there is little evidence of any extensive production of other stones until the first half of the eighteenth century.
See Moss, Graham, Tsang, A Treasury of Chinese Snuff Bottles, Vol. 2, Quartz, no. 365, for a very similar example with an identical inscription. The inscriptions on both these bottles is in the same low relief style found on Zhiting's signed works, and suggests early-eighteenth-century production, with the design conceived as a flat, two-dimensional calligraphic image but raised to a higher plane than that of the ground, as opposed to a more sculptural relief inscription.
As with the Bloch example, this bottle is suffused with a series of fine, moss-like chlorite inclusions concentrated in planes lying roughly parallel to the main sides of the bottle and clearly visible as strong, vertical banding from the narrow sides.