Lot 1136
Treasury 5, no.983 (‘Bitter Fruit’)
HK$150,000

Transparent pale ruby-red, pale yellow, emerald-green, and slightly milky glass, all suffused with air bubbles of various sizes, many elongated; with a flat lip and recessed flat, irregularly oval foot surrounded by a protruding, irregularly oval foot rim made up of elements of the design; carved as a single overlay with a continuous design of two butterflies flying around a leafy bitter-gourd vine with five gourds, a branch of which forms the naturalistic foot rim
1750-1830
Height: 5.7 cm
Mouth/lip: 0.72/1.60 cm
Stopper: glass; pearl finial; glass collar

Provenance:
Eric Young
Sotheby’s, London, 3 March 1987, lot 12

Published:
Kleiner 1987, no. 93
Galeries Lafayette 1990, p. 12, no. 1
Treasury 5, no.983

Exhibited:
Sydney L. Moss Ltd., London, October 1987
Galeries Lafayette, Paris, April 1990
Creditanstalt, Vienna, May-June 1993

Butterflies and bitter gourds are a combination rarely featured upon snuff bottles; they are made all the more unusual here by the colour combination of the overlay. Standard ruby red and a pale emerald green have been balanced by an unusual very pale and transparent yellow that seems almost lost against the ground colour. This allows the artist to emphasize the strong line of red running round the bottle.

It also raises some intriguing questions about the basic process of overlaying. For this bottle, a design probably preceded the glassmaker’s application of blobs of colour, since the disposition of the red seems rather strange and very specific. This is particularly true of the side displaying the larger red butterfly at the top, where a very thin patch of red runs diagonally to connect the upper area of red on one side to its lower equivalent on the other. While it would be possible for a bottle such as lot 1106 in this auction to have been produced from a ready-to-carve overlay blank without advance planning of the design, in this case the application of the colours suggests otherwise. Judging from the surviving body of good quality glass overlay carvings, the majority appear to be one-off works of art. The same designs are often repeated, but the compositions usually differ—a sure sign that each was approached as an individual work. True only of the best carvings, this indicates that at the top end of the market for fine cameo-overlay carvings the processes involved were so complex and time-consuming that saving time by repeating the same composition was hardly worth the effort.

Here, as in the case of Sale 5, lot 120, with its chi dragons in several different colours, the glassworker and the carver were evidently not in perfect harmony. In places the red bleeds into the yellow, leaving one gourd with a red tip. We may assume that the original intention was to create discrete colours for each element of the composition, but practical problems may have forced the carver to override that restriction. Random results originating in such elements of the production process might soon have become appreciated in their own right, however, so it becomes difficult to judge what is accidental and what intentional.

This is another ground in which a heavy suffusion of air bubbles gives the impression of a snowstorm ground plane, despite the absence of the small white flakes that identify an authentic example. It features a very rare colour combination and subject, and the carving is excellent and controlled with great confidence, although we discern a hint of undulation on the ground plane. A date from the mid- to late-Qianlong era is likely, but in private lapidary workshops there is no reason why such quality should not have persisted into the mid nineteenth 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.