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Lot Essay
An elegant and tastefully restrained bottle, the form is beautifully shaped and finished with an exceptional degree of formal integrity. It is very well finished with a pleasantly soft polish, endowing it with a distinctive tactile quality.
This particular stone is paler and of more attractive color with fewer dark markings than the typical 'spinach-green' nephrite of dark, leafy-green color with speckled darker markings used in China from the eighteenth century onward. The latter is said to have been mined around Lake Baykal, to the north of Mongolia and supplied to China from Russia. This distinctive stone, however, represents the green material found in Khotan (Turkistan), which was available to the Chinese prior to the imports from Russia.
Another well-hollowed bottle of similar material is illustrated by R. Hall, Chinese Snuff Bottles IV, no. 33. It is quite possibly from the same source of material as a boulder of distinctive nephrite would probably have been acquired by and used in a single workshop over a relatively short period of time.
This particular stone is paler and of more attractive color with fewer dark markings than the typical 'spinach-green' nephrite of dark, leafy-green color with speckled darker markings used in China from the eighteenth century onward. The latter is said to have been mined around Lake Baykal, to the north of Mongolia and supplied to China from Russia. This distinctive stone, however, represents the green material found in Khotan (Turkistan), which was available to the Chinese prior to the imports from Russia.
Another well-hollowed bottle of similar material is illustrated by R. Hall, Chinese Snuff Bottles IV, no. 33. It is quite possibly from the same source of material as a boulder of distinctive nephrite would probably have been acquired by and used in a single workshop over a relatively short period of time.