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Lot Essay
This bottle represents the silhouette style of agate carving. The style usually requires cutting through much of a thin plane of darker material to leave a shallow, silhouette design.
This bottle falls into a group of agate bottles where the variations in color in the stone provide all or part of the design, with or without surface editing. In a lecture before the 1996 ICSBS convention in Hong Kong, Hugh Moss proposed the term 'ink-play' to relate this concept in the snuff-bottle arts to principles of ink painting (reproduced JICSBS, Autumn 1997, pp. 4-16). 'Ink-play' in the painting tradition refers to the interpretation of random markings made by the free expression of the artist's brush, ink, water and surface. With respect to hardstone carvings, this effect is achieved first by reading the markings as representational imagery, and second, by achieving a balance between the natural markings and subsequent enhancements by the artist. See Moss, Graham and Tsang, A Treasury of Chinese Snuff Bottles, Vol. 2, Quartz, no. 274 for a further discussion of this genre of snuff bottles.
This bottle falls into a group of agate bottles where the variations in color in the stone provide all or part of the design, with or without surface editing. In a lecture before the 1996 ICSBS convention in Hong Kong, Hugh Moss proposed the term 'ink-play' to relate this concept in the snuff-bottle arts to principles of ink painting (reproduced JICSBS, Autumn 1997, pp. 4-16). 'Ink-play' in the painting tradition refers to the interpretation of random markings made by the free expression of the artist's brush, ink, water and surface. With respect to hardstone carvings, this effect is achieved first by reading the markings as representational imagery, and second, by achieving a balance between the natural markings and subsequent enhancements by the artist. See Moss, Graham and Tsang, A Treasury of Chinese Snuff Bottles, Vol. 2, Quartz, no. 274 for a further discussion of this genre of snuff bottles.