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Lot Essay
The 'Three Friends', pine, bamboo and prunus are so called because each retains its vigor during the harshest season of the year. They have long been appropriated as a symbol of the ideal Confucian scholar-official, who, like them, endures in the face of adversity.
For a bottle of baluster shape carved in the same caramel yellow overlay with the 'Three Friends', see Helen White, Snuff Bottles from China, The Victoria and Albert Museum Collection, London, 1992, pp. 216-217, no. 3
For a bottle of baluster shape carved in the same caramel yellow overlay with the 'Three Friends', see Helen White, Snuff Bottles from China, The Victoria and Albert Museum Collection, London, 1992, pp. 216-217, no. 3