17TH CENTURY

Marble furniture played an integral role in traditional Chinese architecture and garden design. Sculptural and durable, marble furniture graced gardens and courtyards and replaced wood furniture that would have had to have been moved outside for gatherings. A Ming-dynasty woodblock illustration of a scene from the play A Dream of Cherries captures the elegant effect of stone furniture within a landscaped terraced garden. Central to the image is a set of four stone stools, accurately detailed with carved bosses encircling the rims, set around an oversized stone table upon which sits several gaming boards. Stone furniture supported the cultivated lifestyle of leisure activities embraced by the Ming elite.

An impressive single and a pair of white marble stools similarly carved with mask-form handles against dense, intertwined foliate scroll were sold in The Flacks Family Collection, Part II: Curtain Call; Christie’s London, 12 May 2026, lot 1 and Christie’s New York, 24 March 2023, lot 1144, respectively.