**THREE SMALL IVORY CARVINGS

Details

**THREE SMALL IVORY CARVINGS
17TH CENTURY AND LATER

One a figure of a woman seated on a rockwork bench, a tiny kitten on the base near her feet, her left hand raised, the right placed on the seat beside her, with two jade bi pendent from cords suspended from the wide sash wrapped around her waist, her hair dressed in a large topknot, bearing traces of gilding and blue pigment (fingers broken); the second a small figure of Dongfang Shuo shown holding a large peach, with ivory base, 17th/18th century; the third an unusual ivory cricket cage, of curved ingot form, the sides formed by slender bars, centered on one side with a vertically raised door composed of three bars fitting into a lobed gourd at the base and a plinth surmounted by a lion above, with a gourd vine in front below the lion and two bats flanking a Shou character on the flat top, with carved key pattern borders, 18th/19th century
6¼, 4 3/8 and 4 1/8in. (15.8, 11.1 and 10.5cm.) high (3)

Exhibited

Cricket Cage: London, Spink & Son Ltd, Ivories of China and the East, November 8-23, 1984, no. 145

Lot Essay

Refer to the figure of Dongfang Shuo exhibited in Chinese Ivories from the Kwan Collection, The Art Gallery, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, July 28-October 14, 1990, Catalogue, no. 58. The catalogue entry discusses the folklore about Dongfang Shuo, a loyal scholar who supposedly lived during the Han dynasty. Apparently he was "eighteen thousand years old" and is generally represented as an older man "running away with peaches, an image symbolizing the wish for longevity"

An ivory cricket cage with decorative borders and with door shown raised, in the William Nelson Gallery of Art, Kansas City, is illustrated by Michel Beurdeley, The Chinese Collector Through the Centuries, Rutland, Vermont and Tokyo, 1966, p. 246, cat. no. 118