Lot 112
Treasury 4, no. 524 (‘Boating on a Summer River’)
HK$75,000

Crystal, ink, and watercolours; with a flat lip and recessed flat foot surrounded by a protruding flat footrim; painted with a continuous landscape scene with a foreground of grassy mounds growing with mature pines and other trees giving way to a country residence with an open thatched pavilion perched on a rocky promontory overlooking an expanse of water on which a scholar sits in a boat gazing across the water to another, also in a boat, who is fishing, with two sailing boats beyond, the far shore made up of rolling hills and distant peaks, inscribed in draft script ‘Executed by Ye Zhongsan at the capital on a summer day in the year kuimao’, with one seal of the artist, yin (‘seal’), in negative seal script
Ye Zhongsan, the Apricot Grove Studio, Chongwen district, Beijing, Summer, 1903
Height: 6.11 cm
Mouth/lip: 0.55/1.93 cm
Stopper: coral; vinyl collar

Provenance:
Sotheby’s, London, 6 and 9 May, 1986, lot 362

Published:
Kleiner 1987, no. 274
Treasury 4, no. 524

Exhibited:
Sydney L. Moss Ltd., London, October 1987
Creditanstalt, Vienna, May–June 1993
Christie's, London, 1999 

As in the case of lot 44 in this sale, although all of the elements here are borrowed directly from Zhou Leyuan, the painting could not be other than by Ye Zhongsan. By this time Ye has absorbed Zhou’s subjects and style into his own and while the debt is still clear, the painting is typically Ye’s.

The colouring is obviously different, with Ye’s much brighter, opaque colours used for the houses and figures. Even the open pavilion has pastel blue columns supporting the roof, and the plateau on which it is set is realistically painted in grassy-green of a clear, bright colour again mixed with a little white, which renders it more opaque. Zhou’s sails were never painted plain white as these are, and his subtly textured foreground hillocks have become bolder and more obvious here.

The crystal bottle here is of a type found commonly in much earlier, plain examples, but the detailing of the foot and neck suggest that Ye had it made along with his other crystal bottles. For a about five years in the late 1930s, when times were so bad in China that old crystal bottles were so cheaply available that it was not worth having them made or even using glass, he used old crystal bottles. Before the economic and political turmoil that created this situation, however, it seems that Ye commissioned crystal blanks on a regular basis and used existing bottles much less frequently. There are, however, from about 1904 onwards an increasing number of painted agate bottles, which do appear to have been old ones.

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.