MARKS OF WANG HING, HONG KONG AND THE RAO WORKSHOP, LATE 19TH OR EARLY 20TH CENTURY

细节

A very rare Chinese enamelled silver-gilt megillah
Marks of Wang Hing, Hong Kong and the Rao workshop, late 19th or early 20th century
The handle formed as a bamboo stem, the hexagonal case cloisonné enamelled in light green and deep blue with alternate panels of prunus and bamboo foliage, the handle to the scroll with ring pull and two hinged clasps, the domed terminal with crenulated border and enamelled with further blue and green foliage and with ball finial, the scroll: ink on vellum, written in Sephardic Hebrew square script, vellum 5.5 cm high, text 4.1 cm high, 15 lines per column, marked on base of case WH twice, 90 and an ideogram reading Rao J. for the Rao workshop
overall length of case 17.5 cm

来源

Acquired in China by Ezra Ezekiel Ezra (d. circa 1920)
and thence by direct descent to his grandson, the present owner.

注意事项

Christie's charge a premium to the buyer on the final bid price of each lot sold at the following rates: 23.8% of the final bid price of each lot sold up to and including €150,000 and 14.28% of any amount in excess of €150,000. Buyers' premium is calculated on the basis of each lot individually.

拍品专文

For examples of the work of the various workshops employed by Wang Hing see John Devereux Kernan, The Chait Collection of Chinese Export Silver, New York, 1985, pp,173-199.

Wang Hing and Co. was recorded at 10 Queen's Road, Hong Kong at the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They supplied a huge variety of silver items ranging from tea-services to punch bowls and from wine labels to even a boson's whistle to, as far away, as India and even Tiffany in New York. Given the range of production and styles and the appearance of various workshop ideograms on pieces marked by them, they were clearly mainly retailers.

Examples of Chinese silver Judaica are extraordinarily rare and this and the following may well be unique and must surely have been produced at the direct request of the present owner's grandfather, Ezra Ezekial Ezra (d. circa 1920) who doubtless would have contributed to their design. Ezra Ezekiel Ezra was an Iraqi Sephardic jew from Baghdad who worked in China in the second half of the nineteenth century as a spice and silk merchant. Several members of the Ezra family were scribes and widely travelled and it seems probable that one of them supplied the scrolls in this and the following case in Hong Kong.