Lot 1105
Treasury 4, no. 466 (‘Zhou Leyuan’s Secluded Scholar’)
HK$106,250

Glass, ink, and watercolours; with a flat lip and recessed convex foot surrounded by a protruding flat foot rim; painted on one main side with a scholar seated in a riverside pavilion above a stone bridge surrounded by blossoming prunus trees in a mountainous setting, inscribed in cursive script Huiyuan yixiong daren zhu, mo Suonan shanren bifa, Zhou Leyuan 薈園一兄大人囑，摹所南山人筆法，周樂元 (‘At the request of Huiyuan, the honourable eldest brother, Zhou Leyuan [painted this by] following the brush method of Suonan shanren’) with one indecipherable seal of the artist and, on the other main side with a group of auspicious objects (a natural rock sculpture, a vase with mask and ring handles on which is visible the trigram Qian from the Eight Trigrams, containing branches of flowering prunus blossom and orchids, a crackled ceramic jardinière containing calamus, partly concealing a gui-shaped incense burner with smoke drifting out of it, and a tripod incense burner with ‘heaven-soaring’ handles), inscribed in draft script with a quatrain and dated Jiashen mengdong, 甲申孟冬 (‘First Winter month of the year jiashen’) with one seal of the artist, Zhou 周, in negative seal script
Zhou Leyuan 周樂元, Studio of Lotus-root Fragrance, Xuannan, Beijing, tenth lunar month, 1884
Height: 6.6 cm
Mouth/lip: 0.58/1.56 cm
Stopper: glass; vinyl collar

Provenance:
Sotheby’s New York, 6 April 1990, lot 382

Published:
Kleiner, Yang, and Shangraw 1994, no. 309
Treasury 4, no. 466

Exhibited:
Hong Kong Museum of Art, March–June 1994
National Museum, Singapore, November 1994–February 1995
Christie’s, London, 1999

The poem above the subject of auspicious objects is by Zheng Xie 鄭燮 (1693 – 1766), perhaps better known as Zheng Banqiao 鄭板橋. One of the Eight Eccentrics of Yangzhou, he was also a poet; this is one of a series of poems on the subject of orchids to be inscribed on paintings:

為買春風二月天。蘇松宿草種成田。隔江相望無多路，一到揚州便值錢。

In order to ‘buy’ the spring breeze,
on a day in the second month,
They take the sparse plants from last year
and plant enough to make a field full.
From across the Yangzi one may gaze,
but it’s hard to reach them--
So once they reach Yangzhou
they’ll be worth more money.

Suonan shanren, to whose influence Zhou attributes his style in this case, is the hao of Zheng Sixiao 鄭思肖 (1241–1318), a painter of the Southern Song who survived into the Yuan dynasty and remained loyal to the fallen Song house. He was particularly known for paintings of bamboo and orchids.

By 1884, Zhou Leyuan exhibits complete mastery of the medium. Although his style evolves slowly during the decade until his last work (the single example from 1893), his mastery is consistent from 1884 onwards. While his later landscapes are immensely impressive and always spectacular, there is a magical, mysterious quality about his finest early landscapes from the years 1884, 1885, and 1886 that is difficult to resist. The landscape scene here is a delightful example of the quality and appeal of this early style.

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.