QIANLONG FOUR-CHARACTER WHEEL-CUT MARK WITHIN A SQUARE AND OF THE PERIOD (1736-1795)

The decoration on this bowl was created by wheel engraving, which refers to the incising and roughening of the surface of the glass with a rotary tool. This technique was very popular in European glass and was popularized in China in the eighteenth century (see, C.F. Shangraw and C. Brown, A Chorus of Colors: Chinese Glass from Three American Collections, Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, 1995, p. 60). The technique may have been introduced to Chinese glass craftsmen by the Jesuit missionaries working in the court at the time.

A transparent amber glass cup with wheel-engraved decoration from the Walter and Phyllis Shorenstein Collection decorated with nearly identical rocks as those on the present bowl, is illustrated in ibid., no. 32., and was later sold at Christie’s Hong Kong, 1 December 2010, lot 2916. (Fig. 1) See, also, an amber glass cup engraved with a flowering tree and a butterfly, in the collection of the Palace Museum, Beijing, illustrated by Zhang Rong (ed.), Luster of Autumn Water - Glass of the Qing Imperial Workshop, Forbidden City Publishing House, 2005, p. 284, no. 113, also with similarly rendered wheel-engraved decoration as that on the present bowl.