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Lot Essay
This extraordinary bottle is a masterpiece of Qing hard-stone carving, combining an inspired use of the material and masterful control of the medium to illustrate one of the most enduring poems of Chinese culture, Chibi Fu ('Prose poem on the Red Cliff'). Shown here is the quintessential Song scholar Su Shi returning with his two companions from a second trip, when a crane flies beneath the moon and lets out a long cry, echoing Su Shi's scream of intense emotion while wandering alone in the cliffs. In his dream that night, Su Shi is visited by a Daoist Immortal who asks if he enjoyed his trip, and he realizes the Immortal was the same crane that echoed his cry.
The bottle bears certain features of the school attributed to Suzhou, but is not characteristically Suzhou. The serrated rock work is suggestive of the Suzhou style, but differs in being more evenly disposed and the lines being neatly incised with equally spaced small dots. It is stylistically related to another masterpiece in the J & J Collection, illustrated in The Art of the Chinese Snuff Bottle, no. 143, with its inspired use of the stone's white marking and the stylistic references to the Suzhou school. Suzhou was one of the principal stone-carving centers in China, and there would have been a variety of associated styles produced in the different workshops of the town. It is quite possible this group may merely be an element of a much broader local style.
The bottle bears certain features of the school attributed to Suzhou, but is not characteristically Suzhou. The serrated rock work is suggestive of the Suzhou style, but differs in being more evenly disposed and the lines being neatly incised with equally spaced small dots. It is stylistically related to another masterpiece in the J & J Collection, illustrated in The Art of the Chinese Snuff Bottle, no. 143, with its inspired use of the stone's white marking and the stylistic references to the Suzhou school. Suzhou was one of the principal stone-carving centers in China, and there would have been a variety of associated styles produced in the different workshops of the town. It is quite possible this group may merely be an element of a much broader local style.