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Lot Essay
One of the strengths of the J & J Collection is an important group of bottles decorated in delicate famille rose enamels produced by the Imperial ateliers established at the court in Beijing. By the reign of the Emperor Qianlong, between 1736 and the 1750s, the Palace enameling workshops had reached their peak in mastering the manufacture and painting of enamels on metal, porcelain and glass. A combination of intense Imperial interest, the fruits of the Kangxi and Yongzheng Emperors' contributions to enameling in the various media, and proliferation of both Court artists and Jesuit missionaries involved in designing and painting the wares, resulted in a short zenith for the art. The present example dates from the early Qianlong period.
An artistic device used by Palace enamelers throughout the Qianlong period was stippling: the gradation of shade or color by applying a mass of tiny dots. Technically, this allowed for wide variation in intensity of color without constantly changing the saturation of the enamel. The alternative was to use different washes so that the intensity of the enamel was diluted. The present bottle is predominantly stippled to produce shading and chiaroscuro.
However, what sets this bottle apart is the Chinese figure subjects painted entirely in the Western manner, which makes it rarer than the 'European subject' counterparts painted in the Palace workshops. The scene here is a generalized, ideal setting for wives and concubines, with the figures portrayed bringing up the children and filling their protected lives with divertissements of a refined nature, as was the norm for the influential minority of eighteenth-century China. See a Beijing enamel snuff bottle painted in a similar style, Snuff Bottles in the Collection of the National Palace Museum, no. 12, which has a similar motif of women with children.
An artistic device used by Palace enamelers throughout the Qianlong period was stippling: the gradation of shade or color by applying a mass of tiny dots. Technically, this allowed for wide variation in intensity of color without constantly changing the saturation of the enamel. The alternative was to use different washes so that the intensity of the enamel was diluted. The present bottle is predominantly stippled to produce shading and chiaroscuro.
However, what sets this bottle apart is the Chinese figure subjects painted entirely in the Western manner, which makes it rarer than the 'European subject' counterparts painted in the Palace workshops. The scene here is a generalized, ideal setting for wives and concubines, with the figures portrayed bringing up the children and filling their protected lives with divertissements of a refined nature, as was the norm for the influential minority of eighteenth-century China. See a Beijing enamel snuff bottle painted in a similar style, Snuff Bottles in the Collection of the National Palace Museum, no. 12, which has a similar motif of women with children.