Lot 52

Lot 52
Treasury 6, no. 1361

A dark and light-grey porcelain ‘dragon’ snuff bottle

(‘Eminence Gris’)

Dark- and light-grey porcelain; with a flat lip and recessed flat foot surrounded by a protruding, flat footrim; carved, using the darker colour as a cameo relief, with an imperial five-clawed dragon chasing a flaming pearl on one main side and formalized ribbons of clouds on the other, with a few tendrils wrapped around to the other main side
Attributed to Wang Bingrong, Jingdezhen, 1820–1860
Height: 7.15 cm
Mouth/lip: 0.57/1.89 cm
Stopper: tourmaline; silver collar

Lot 52 Provenance:
Alex S. Cussons
Sydney L. Moss Ltd. (circa 1964)
Unrecorded collector
Hugh Moss (HK) Ltd. (1996)

Published:
Treasury 6, no. 1361

Lot 52 Commentary
The second of the unsigned bottles we can firmly attribute to Wang Bingrong is this unique version from the Cussons Collection. The dragon’s head is typical of Wang – note the buck teeth, two above and four below – and the manner in which the rather formal five claws of the dragon are drawn is also typical of Wang. Given the five claws, there is no reason to think this was not among the wares Wang produced for the court. Why it remained neither signed nor reign marked is a mystery, but other unsigned examples are known to have been made by him (see, for instance, Vanessa Holden 2002, no. 219).

Although the porcelain carvers of the nineteenth century often used unglazed biscuit porcelain, it was nearly always of a single white colour. In this extraordinary variation, the porcelain itself has been dyed two shades of grey, and the darker one has been used as a cameo relief to great effect – so successfully, in fact, that one can only wonder at why this technique was not used more often.

Alex Cussons, one of the most famous of the European collectors of the second half of the twentieth century, was a splendidly larger-than-life character with a gargantuan appetite for snuff bottles. He went for variety, colour, rarity – you name it. His collection was displayed in a large number of the small Chinese Chippendale-style cabinets popular at the time, spread around the enormous dining room of his home in Cheshire. One cabinet contained nothing but emerald-green jadeite and coral, which was enough to take your mind off the soup. Among his many porcelain bottles were quite a few of these carved porcelains, as he was always a sucker for quality, although he never let that get in the way of being a sucker for quantity as well. It was Cussons who took Moss under his wing when he first started and encouraged him to publish the first issue of his magazine Chinese Snuff Bottles by paying all the publication costs.