Lot 213
Treasury 7, no. 1511 (‘Winter Preparations’)
HK$43,750

Citrus fruit, probably orange peel; with a slightly irregular flat lip and a protruding flat foot; grown into a mould to create four panels separated by beaded frames, each of the main sides with a poetic inscription in relief, the narrow-side panels each with a mask-and-ring handle above a spread-eagled bat looking upwards, the shoulders with a band of pendant, formalized petals; the neck with bands of concentric lines, the interior left relatively rough
1750–1850
Height: 5.06 cm
Mouth/lip: 0.79 (with irregular profile)/1.39 cm
Stopper: amber; plastic collar

Provenance:
John Ault
Robert Kleiner (2006)

Published:
Treasury 7, no. 1511

The surface of this snuff bottle resembles bamboo with its speckling and grain, but much of this arises from the fact that this bottle has obviously been very well handled over the years and has patinated to a dark, well-worn, woody surface. It was apparently made from an orange with a substantial skin, which suggests that it may have been a small species of the more usual type of orange, rather than the thinner-skinned tangerine or mandarin orange. We are not entirely sure what would result from growing a full-sized, thick-skinned orange into a severely limiting mould, but one might get precisely this effect, a small bottle but with an unusually thick body.

There are some intriguing imperial touches here, but although the palace possessed the infrastructure for moulding fruits and had mould makers at hand, there is scant evidence that citrus-fruit bottles were produced there.

The mask-and-ring handles were a standard courtly feature, and these small ones with tiny rings are one eighteenth-century imperial standard. The formalized petals around the shoulders are also courtly, echoing the shoulder bands on imperial enamels and many other materials, but of course imperial decoration might have been ordered from anywhere in the empire, and court taste might equally have influenced distant, private production.

The first quotation reads:

Who calls himself poet elder there on the ocean?
Pray let me have a look at his magnificent writings.

A random jotting

This is from a story about the great Tang poet Li Bai reappearing over two centuries after his death, floating in a boat down a river (not the ocean, as the bottle’s artist would have it); a scholar seeing the boat, which displays a white placard reading ‘Poet Elder’, chants these lines and is startled when someone in the boat answers with ‘The night is quiet, and I cannot compose a quatrain, / Fearing that I’ll startle the Dipper and make it fall into the river to be chilled.’ The story is found in a book of tales by the famous Ming dynasty collector of stories, Feng Menglong.

The second set of lines is quoted from the famous poetic composition entitled Guiqulai ci (Home Again) by Tao Qian (also known as Tao Yuanming, 365–427), the farm-and-garden poet of the Jin dynasty who relinquished a minor government post after serving only eighty days to return home to lead a carefree life in the countryside.

I lean by the south window, lodging my lofty feelings in the view,
And consider how easily I find contentment in a house that barely admits my frame.

[Inscribed] on a winter day

If the ‘winter day’ notation is any indication, the presumably wooden mould for this bottle was carved in the winter in preparation for the growing season.

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.