Lot 68
Treasury 6, no. 1370 (‘Surfeit of Lingzhi’)
HK$27,500

Colourless glaze on cobalt on porcelain; a miniature vase with a flared mouth, convex lip, and recessed flat foot surrounded by a convex foot rim; painted under the glaze with a continuous design of lingzhi growing among leaves with alternate panels of two and three fungi, the foot inscribed in underglaze-blue regular script, Da Qing Yongzheng nian zhi 大清雍正年製 (‘Made in the Yongzheng era of the Qing dynasty’)
Jingdezhen, 1815–1860
Height: 5 cm
Lip: 1.9 cm (the mouth is a continuous curve)
Stopper: colourless glaze on cobalt on porcelain; John Charlton, London, circa 1970

Provenance:
Sotheby’s (PB 84) New York, 12 March 1980, lot 67
Gerd Lester (1986)

Published:
Treasury 6, no. 1370

The drawing here is well controlled, and the blue is a good hue with pleasing variations in tone, but these vases are emphatically not Yongzheng in either style or nature, nor are the marks convincingly written for the Yongzheng reign. No Yongzheng blue-and-white snuff bottles appear to have been produced, making exact comparisons impossible, but there is a very wide variety of other blue-and-white wares from the reign; their qualities are well known, and we can see that these two miniatures are based upon genuine vases of the Yongzheng era. (For another counterfeit Yongzheng vase, see Christie’s, South Kensington, 14 November 2002, lot 480.)

This and lot 69 are not a pair, but part of a series. Their neatly matching stoppers may make the wares look like snuff bottles, but the stoppers were not made until the early 1970s. The continuous curve of the flared mouth is also ill-suited to holding a cork and is more characteristic of a miniature vase. Of course, any suitable container became a snuff bottle once it was filled with snuff and stoppered. Small vases of this type with flared inner necks have been broadly adopted by snuff-bottle collectors in the past century or so and were probably similarly adopted by snuff takers in the late Qing period.

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