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Lot Essay
The poetic inscription on this bottle may be read:
On this same day last year within the very same portals,The rouge on a fair face was reflected by the peach blossoms.[Now] that face is nowhere to be seen.Only the peach blossoms still keep smiling in the spring breeze.
Cui Hu was a scholar-official of the Tang dynasty who, after many attempts, succeeded in obtaining the jinshi degree in the year 796. The inscription on this bottle is an excerpt from a poem by Cui referring to a time when he became thirsty during one of his wanderings and was given water by a lovely maiden who lived in a mountain retreat. A year later, he passed by the dwelling, and the door was locked and the young maiden was nowhere to be found. Fortunately, the story has a happy ending, as the maiden eventually became Cui's wife.
The second part of the inscription establishes that the design, or at least the composition of the inscription, was prepared by a Wang Mengxiong of Weixi (in Henan province), in the cyclical year yiwei. This year likely corresponds to 1835, although the inscription which inspired the design may have been written earlier, perhaps in 1775 or 1715. It is not clear from the context if Wang Mengxiong was specifically involved in the production of this bottle.
The inscription appears to be by the same hand as those which appear on two other bottles in the J & J Collection, illustrated by Moss, Graham, Tsang, The Art of the Chinese Snuff Bottle. The J & J Collection, nos. 215 and no. 218. All three inscriptions give different writers' names and thus suggest they were composed by different people. However, they are clearly written by the same enameller, and the group is likely to date from the same period, perhaps from the mid-1830s onwards.
On this same day last year within the very same portals,The rouge on a fair face was reflected by the peach blossoms.[Now] that face is nowhere to be seen.Only the peach blossoms still keep smiling in the spring breeze.
Cui Hu was a scholar-official of the Tang dynasty who, after many attempts, succeeded in obtaining the jinshi degree in the year 796. The inscription on this bottle is an excerpt from a poem by Cui referring to a time when he became thirsty during one of his wanderings and was given water by a lovely maiden who lived in a mountain retreat. A year later, he passed by the dwelling, and the door was locked and the young maiden was nowhere to be found. Fortunately, the story has a happy ending, as the maiden eventually became Cui's wife.
The second part of the inscription establishes that the design, or at least the composition of the inscription, was prepared by a Wang Mengxiong of Weixi (in Henan province), in the cyclical year yiwei. This year likely corresponds to 1835, although the inscription which inspired the design may have been written earlier, perhaps in 1775 or 1715. It is not clear from the context if Wang Mengxiong was specifically involved in the production of this bottle.
The inscription appears to be by the same hand as those which appear on two other bottles in the J & J Collection, illustrated by Moss, Graham, Tsang, The Art of the Chinese Snuff Bottle. The J & J Collection, nos. 215 and no. 218. All three inscriptions give different writers' names and thus suggest they were composed by different people. However, they are clearly written by the same enameller, and the group is likely to date from the same period, perhaps from the mid-1830s onwards.