Lot 123

Lot 123
Treasury 1, no. 38

An inscribed black and white nephrite snuff bottle

(‘Couplet in the Gorge’)

Nephrite; very well hollowed, with a recessed, convex foot; carved on each side in relief seal script on a raised panel with auspicious wishes, ‘[May your] life span [be] as long as the hills and mountains,’ and ‘[May your] happiness [be] as everlasting as the sea and the sky.’
1750–1860
Height: 8.93 cm
Mouth/lip: 0.55/1.82 and 1.8 cm (oval)
Stopper: stained bone; silver collar

Lot 123 Provenance:
Trojan Collection
Robert Hall (1993)

Published:
Hall 1992, no. 16
Kleiner 1995, no. 97
Treasury 1, no. 38

Exhibited:
British Museum, June–October 1995
Israel Museum, Jerusalem, 1997

Lot 123 Commentary
The main feature that distinguishes this bottle from all others is the unusually elongated form, which is as effective as it is rare. The relief calligraphy in seal script is then perfectly adapted to this form. This is one version of a common chunlian (‘spring couplets’, grammatically parallel lines expressing an auspicious sentiment and pasted up on either side of a door for New Year’s).
Because of their prominence as the principal decoration they tend to overshadow another delightful feature of the bottle, the unusual material and its evocative markings. Stripped, mentally, of its surface decoration, the material can be placed in a broad group of plain black-and-white jade bottles with natural, albeit very abstract designs (see, for example, Sale 1, lot 11, and Moss, Graham, and Tsang 1993, no. 54). As such, it is one of the finest of them. Apart from an extraordinary speckly chatoyement, rare but not unknown in nephrite, on each of the narrow sides, the markings evoke a powerful abstract ink-painting of a gorge with waterfalls, which can be read in a number of different ways, all of them immensely satisfying as pictorial art within the Chinese tradition.