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Lot Essay
Carved from a jade pebble complete with its ‘skin’, this snuff bottle depicts a cluster of mulberry leaves growing from a fruiting branch, with the head of a silkworm emerging from the leaves, and with three small moths. The surface has a high polish that enhances the overall warm tone of the jade.
This is a rare example in which a natural pebble has been preserved in its original form and transformed into a snuff bottle with a delicately carved design. The pebble’s outer skin is left intact throughout, except where it is skillfully cut away to reveal the white nephrite beneath at the point where the head of a feeding silkworm emerges. Ingeniously conceived, the bottle represents a masterful expression of the creativity of the Chinese artisan in working with natural pebble material.
This subject matter illustrates the life cycle of the silkworm, which was so important to the Chinese economy over the centuries, and encapsulates the important facets of sericulture, namely the mulberry leaf which feeds the silkworm, the silkworm itself and the moth that represents the completion of the process. The subject appears to have been more popular for glass snuff bottles, such as two pink-ground glass examples illustrated by Moss, Graham, Tsang in A Treasury of Chinese Snuff Bottles: The Mary and George Bloch Collection, Vol. 5, Part 3, Hong Kong, 2002, pp. 694-98, nos. 1009 and 1010.
This is a rare example in which a natural pebble has been preserved in its original form and transformed into a snuff bottle with a delicately carved design. The pebble’s outer skin is left intact throughout, except where it is skillfully cut away to reveal the white nephrite beneath at the point where the head of a feeding silkworm emerges. Ingeniously conceived, the bottle represents a masterful expression of the creativity of the Chinese artisan in working with natural pebble material.
This subject matter illustrates the life cycle of the silkworm, which was so important to the Chinese economy over the centuries, and encapsulates the important facets of sericulture, namely the mulberry leaf which feeds the silkworm, the silkworm itself and the moth that represents the completion of the process. The subject appears to have been more popular for glass snuff bottles, such as two pink-ground glass examples illustrated by Moss, Graham, Tsang in A Treasury of Chinese Snuff Bottles: The Mary and George Bloch Collection, Vol. 5, Part 3, Hong Kong, 2002, pp. 694-98, nos. 1009 and 1010.