A FINE INSIDE-PAINTED GLASS SNUFF BOTTLE

SIGNED YE ZHONGSAN, DATED MID-SUMMER IN THE DINGWEI YEAR, CORRESPONDING TO 1907

細節

A FINE INSIDE-PAINTED GLASS SNUFF BOTTLE
SIGNED YE ZHONGSAN, DATED MID-SUMMER IN THE DINGWEI YEAR, CORRESPONDING TO 1907
Of ovoid form with a flat lip and recessed foot surrounded by a footrim, finely painted with a continuous design of magpies perched and flying around the spreading branches of a newly blossoming prunus tree, with further birds perched on rocks beside white peonies at the base of the tree trunk and a lone bird in flight on the foot, inscribed in draft script "Composed mid-summer (the fifth month) in the dingwei year by Ye Zhongsan", with one seal, yin, coral glass stopper with mother-of-pearl finial and vinyl collar
2 1/8 in. (5.4 cm.) high

來源

Wasserman Collection.
Hugh Moss Ltd.

出版

Hugh Moss Limited, Chinese Snuff Bottles, Summer 1976, p. 64, no. 175.
JICSBS, Autumn 1982, p. 42.

展覽

Canadian Craft Museum, Vancouver, 1992.

拍品專文

Magpies (xique) represent happy events, and can also evoke another expression, xibao chunxian ("The magpie announces the arrival of spring"). Thirty magpies also illustrate a popular tale related to snuff bottles which is narrated in Yonglu Xianjie, Zhao Zhiqian's late-nineteenth century book on snuff and snuff bottles, where a man was tricked into paying a fortune for a porcelain bottle which seemed to depict each day of the month with a corresponding number of magpies, when in fact, the trickster had thirty bottles, each painted with a different number of birds, which he brought one by one in sequential order as if the bottles were one and the same.

For a very similar bottle, formerly from the Wise collection and now in the Denis Low Collection, see More Treasures from the Sanctum of Enlightened Respect, p. 349, no. 314. It would appear that Ye painted two or three wide-mouthed snuff bottles with magpies at Beijing in the spring of 1907.