Lot 123

Lot 123
Treasury 4, no.509 (‘The Ferryman in Summer’)
HK$106,250

An inside-painted glass 'landscape' snuff bottle

Glass, ink, and watercolours; with a flat lip and recessed convex foot, surrounded by a protruding rounded footrim; painted with a continuous landscape scene set on either side of an expanse of water, the foreground with two pines and another tree on a grassy knoll with willows beyond on the foreground shore where two scholars stroll, one pointing towards an open thatched pavilion where a ferryman punts his boat, perhaps in readiness to pick them up for a boating trip, the far bank composed of the foothills of distant mountains, inscribed in draft script ‘Painted by Ye Zhongsan at the capital in a winter month in the year yiwei’, with one seal of the artist, huayin (‘painting seal’), in negative seal script
Ye Zhongsan, the Apricot Grove Studio, Chongwen district, Beijing, winter, 1895
Height: 6.17 cm
Mouth/lip: 0.59/1.45 cm
Stopper: jasper; gilt-metal collar

Provenance:
Sotheby’s Hong Kong, 5 May 1994, lot 1585

Published:
Treasury 4, no.509

Exhibited:
Christie’s, London, 1999
Musée de la Miniature, Montelimar, 2000

All of the elements of this painting are borrowed from Zhou Leyuan’s oeuvre, although they have been rearranged to include, for instance, willow trees in a compositional type where Zhou never included them. The clump of trees, with two pines and another large tree in the foreground, the open pavilion, the two figures strolling along a riverbank, the ferryman punting his boat, and the distant mountains are all taken from Zhou’s works. Even the willows are Zhou’s, although used differently, since Zhou tended to paint either willows or the clump of trees, but not both together. What Ye has done with Zhou’s pictorial elements, however, is breath-taking. It is one of his finest interpretations of the master’s art, superbly painted with complete mastery, the mastery that is seen in Ye’s works consistently only from 1895 onwards. Even the black detailing of grass on the knoll is far more subtly painted than is usual for Ye. The distant line of hills is particularly impressive, with a lovely composition that, while following Zhou’s general idea, is still painted in a distinctive style that could only be by Ye at his finest. Apart from the unusual composition of the far line of hills as a horizontal element separated from the foreground by water and mist rather than the more integrated approach of Zhou Leyuan, the difference in style can be seen in the way Ye has organized the paler hillocks that make up each peak. He has concentrated them into vertical groups to suggest small valleys that descend from each of the nearer peaks. This departure from Zhou’s style has been achieved with some of the most delicate and subtle shading of washes and pale ink tones in the entire medium.

The open pavilion also differs from Zhou’s in that it is much more realistically thatched. Zhou tended to adumbrate thatch by simply dividing the roof horizontally into two areas, to define the thatch below and the usually solid crown that held it in place and prevented water leaking through at the pinnacle. Here Ye has painted in the thatch and the crown realistically, allowing us to see what Zhou intended. The grass-edged plateau on which it stands is also exquisitely painted. Ye has painted here a bottle that even Zhou could have admired as far more than just a copy or pastiche of his own work.

The glass bottle here is unusual for Ye’s output. He seems to have had access to the same bottle source as Zhou Leyuan for most of his career, as did most of the Beijing artists. The distinctive features of this workshop were the elongated, rounded-rectangular form, the concave lip, and recessed convex foot surrounded by a protruding rounded footrim. Occasionally, the footrim was flattened a little, but the characteristics remain much the same. In cases where these bottles have flat lips, it is usually due to chips having been removed along with the original concavity. Here, however, we can be less certain that this was the case, since the bottle is obviously from a different manufacturer, to whom Ye went in 1895. There is another example from the same year recorded. Here the glass is brighter, more crystal-like in its appearance, and has characteristically thicker shoulders where the interior hollowing does not follow the outer form accurately. It also has a narrower neck, compared to the width of the body, than the standard glass blanks.

This seal, the most complex used by Ye, was confined to his earlier years, appearing on his works only until 1900, after which it is replaced by the simpler yin (‘seal’) in negative seal script, which was the most popular style for the Beijing School artists and served the function of being a non-specific seal. It was primarily a formal element to round off the calligraphy in the same way that literati artists used seals to balance their calligraphic compositions.