Lot 1125
Treasury 4, no. 515 (‘Ye’s Ongoing Debt to The Master’)
HK$187,500

Crystal, ink, and watercolours; with a flat lip and concave foot; painted on one main side with a boy playing his flute and riding a water buffalo through the shallow waters of a river between grassy banks growing with willow trees, the other main side with a group of auspicious objects (a natural rock sculpture, a rectangular jardinière with a miniature pine tree growing in it, and a crackled ceramic vessel containing a branch of blossoming prunus), inscribed in cursive script, Fang Guyue shanren biyi, dingyou xia fu xie yu jingshi, Ye Zhongsan 仿古月山人筆意，丁酉夏伏寫於京師，葉仲三 (‘In imitation of the brush manner of Guyue shanren, executed by Ye Zhongsan at the capital in the Prostration month of the summer of the year dingyou’), with one seal of the artist, yin (‘seal’), in negative seal script
Ye Zhongsan, the Apricot Grove Studio, Chongwen district, Beijing, sixth lunar month of spring 1897
Height: 5.22 cm
Mouth/lip: 0.49/1.55 cm
Stopper: glass; vinyl collar

Provenance:
Hugh M. Moss Ltd (1985)

Published:
Treasury 4, no. 515

Exhibited:
Christie’s, London, 1999

The only artist we have found who adopted the literary name Guyue shanren (‘Ancient Moon Hermit’) is a calligrapher named Hu Yingen 胡寅根, but his dates are 1888 – 1936, making him suspiciously young for the date on this bottle, not to mention the fact that he is not known as a painter. It is possible that Ye Zhongsan simply made up a name based on the Guyue xuan (‘Ancient Moon Pavilion’). Why he should attribute this style to an imaginary artist, however, when it is so clearly in the style of and following the subject matter of Zhou Leyuan, is a mystery. Ye constantly reverted to the style of Zhou throughout his career, even adding his signature and an appropriate apocryphal date on a regular basis to create actual forgeries.

Both subjects and style here are lifted directly from the master’s output, and only minor differences in artistic personality would separate the two artists were it not for the honest signature in this case. Another indication of Ye’s pattern-book repetition is to be found in the way the water buffalo is painted. In Sale 5, lot 30, dated 1893, Ye copied the standard Zhou Leyuan image of the water buffalo wading through shallow water with its head turned back across its body and facing down into the bottom, right-hand corner, but he misunderstood the anatomical detail of the beast. Instead of painting it from his own observations, as Zhou had, he copied Zhou’s image and put the right fore-leg in an awkward position. Here, the error is not as blatant, but the rendition is still mildly unconvincing. Having copied it once, Ye repeated it with the same shortcoming without any attempt to bring the image into consonance with anatomical reality as he progressed.

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.