Lot 250
Treasury 4, no. 650 (‘Ladies at Leisure’)
HK$40,000

Pale brown crystal, ink, and watercolours; with a slightly concave lip and a concave foot; painted on one main side with a young woman in a red gown talking with a young man in a garden setting, the other main side with two women in a study, one seated at a desk with an inkstone on it, applying a brush to a sheet of paper, while the other stands in front of the desk and looks on, a garden visible through two large square windows behind them, inscribed in draft script, ‘Executed by Ye Zhongsan in a summer month of the year dingmao,’ with one seal of the artist, yin (‘seal’), in negative seal script
Bottle: 1740–1860
Painting: Ye family, the Apricot Grove Studio, Chongwen district, Beijing, summer, 1927
Height: 4.4 cm
Mouth/lip: 0.56/1.43 cm
Stopper: coral; gilt-bronze collar

Provenance:
Robert Kleiner (1992)

Published:
Kleiner, Yang, and Shangraw 1994, no. 333
Treasury 4, no. 650

Exhibited:
Hong Kong Museum of Art, March–June 1994
National Museum, Singapore, November 1994–February 1995
Christie's, London, 1999

The figures depicted here are almost certainly from Honglou meng (Dream of Red Mansions), also called Shitou ji (The Story of the Stone); the young man in green in the garden scene is the main character in the novel, Jia Baoyu. He may be talking to the maid Xiren. On the other side, the two women are probably Baochai (seated) and Daiyu. The lively five-volume Penguin translation by David Hawkes and John Minford is hereby recommended to those unfortunate enough not to have had the opportunity to read this engaging eighteenth-century novel.

The painting is typical of Ye’s figural subjects from the early twentieth century onwards, with bright colours and a simple, decorative style ideally suited to story-book illustration, although here the brightness of the colours is muted by the brown crystal, which helps to soften the overall impression. It is also, incidentally, a lovely little miniature crystal bottle that must have existed as a plain bottle long before Ye painted inside it in 1927. It is beautifully made and, with the elongated, flattened apple shape with a flared neck and narrow lip rim, might have been made for the court during the eighteenth century.

This is not the Sotheby’s sale catalogue. This is a product of Hugh Moss for the purposes of this website. For the catalogue details please refer to Sotheby’s website or request a copy of a printed sale catalogue from Sotheby’s.