Lot 247
Treasury 7, no. 1672 (‘White Eggplant’)
HK$93,750

Translucent white glass and spinach-green nephrite; with a flat lip and flat foot; carved in the form of an eggplant, the white glass body of the fruit embellished with a green nephrite calyx
Probably imperial, attributable to the palace workshops, Beijing, 1740–1800
Height: 8.72 cm (including original stopper)
Mouth: 0.77 cm
Stopper: spinach-green nephrite, carved as a stalk; original

Provenance:
Robert Hall (1985)

Published:
Hall 1987, no. 86
Kleiner 1995, no. 149
Treasury 7, no. 1672

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

The obvious intention here was to simulate the standard white-and-green nephrite eggplant-form snuff bottles. The fact that this is the only known example with a glass body suggests a palace response to the standard jade versions. From the palace workshops the emperor could have ordered a glass version as easily as a jade one, and it might have amused him to do so, having received the jade versions from afar as tribute. In contrast, an official in the provinces wishing to send tribute to the emperor would have had more trouble finding both a competent glassworks and a jade-carving workshop. Thus, any such distant supplicant is unlikely to have produced a version combining the two materials. They would have been still less likely to have produced a single example. The fact that only one has survived does not, of course, mean that only one was made, but if the glass version had been originally made as part of a set of up to ten bottles, we might expect one or two more to have survived. Only the palace workshops were most likely to have the expertise in multiple media for a work like this and only they could respond to an imperial whim without worrying about efficiencies of scale.

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