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Lot Essay
This charming pair of jadeite pillows, each carved in the form of a crouching boy, belongs to a long tradition of child-shaped pillows that flourished in ceramic form during the Song and Jin dynasties. The prototype is perhaps best represented by the celebrated Northern Song Ding ware boy-form pillow in the National Palace Museum, Taipei (Fig. 1), a work whose lively modeling and auspicious subject made it especially admired at the Qing imperial court. The Taipei Palace Ding pillow bears an imperial poem on its underside composed by the Qianlong Emperor in the spring of 1773. In the poem, Qianlong transforms the playful image of childhood into one of moral reflection: the act of sleep evoked both the ruler’s duty to remain vigilant and the classical ideal of discovering worthy ministers through dreams, as in the story of King Wu Ding of the Shang dynasty and his loyal minister Fu Yue.
The present pair may be understood as a Qing reinterpretation of this admired ceramic form, translated into the rarer and more luxurious medium of jadeite. Introduced into China from Myanmar and increasingly prized at the Qing court, jadeite was celebrated for its saturated green tones, translucency, and brilliant polish. A related jadeite pillow dating to the 19th century in the form of an infant boy, formerly in the Heber R. Bishop Collection and gifted to The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York in 1902, is illustrated in The Heber R. Bishop Collection of Jade and Other Hard Stones Handbook, New York, 1909, p. 41, no. 10. (Fig. 2) A pair of closely related jadeite pillows in the form of kneeling boys, formerly in the collection of Mrs. Christian R. Holmes, was sold at Christie’s New York, 21 September 2004, lot 118.
The present pair is further distinguished by its richly auspicious imagery. Each boy carries a lotus leaf upon his back and holds a sheng 笙, a reed-pipe musical instrument. Together, these motifs form an ingenious visual rebus: lotus, lian 蓮, is homophonous with lian 連, “successively” or “continuously,” while sheng 笙 echoes sheng 生, “to give birth” or “to engender”; the boys themselves supply the final element, zi 子, “sons.” Read together, the imagery evokes the auspicious expression lian sheng gui zi 連生貴子, conveying the wish for the successive birth of worthy sons and the flourishing of the family line. Such wordplay, in which natural forms, objects, and figures are combined through homophony to articulate blessings for fertility and dynastic continuity, was deeply embedded in the visual language of Qing decorative art.
The present pair may be understood as a Qing reinterpretation of this admired ceramic form, translated into the rarer and more luxurious medium of jadeite. Introduced into China from Myanmar and increasingly prized at the Qing court, jadeite was celebrated for its saturated green tones, translucency, and brilliant polish. A related jadeite pillow dating to the 19th century in the form of an infant boy, formerly in the Heber R. Bishop Collection and gifted to The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York in 1902, is illustrated in The Heber R. Bishop Collection of Jade and Other Hard Stones Handbook, New York, 1909, p. 41, no. 10. (Fig. 2) A pair of closely related jadeite pillows in the form of kneeling boys, formerly in the collection of Mrs. Christian R. Holmes, was sold at Christie’s New York, 21 September 2004, lot 118.
The present pair is further distinguished by its richly auspicious imagery. Each boy carries a lotus leaf upon his back and holds a sheng 笙, a reed-pipe musical instrument. Together, these motifs form an ingenious visual rebus: lotus, lian 蓮, is homophonous with lian 連, “successively” or “continuously,” while sheng 笙 echoes sheng 生, “to give birth” or “to engender”; the boys themselves supply the final element, zi 子, “sons.” Read together, the imagery evokes the auspicious expression lian sheng gui zi 連生貴子, conveying the wish for the successive birth of worthy sons and the flourishing of the family line. Such wordplay, in which natural forms, objects, and figures are combined through homophony to articulate blessings for fertility and dynastic continuity, was deeply embedded in the visual language of Qing decorative art.