Lot 105
Treasury 4, no. 477 (‘Golden Abundance’)
HK$32,500

Glass, ink, and watercolours; with an irregularly rounded lip and a recessed convex foot surrounded by a protruding flattened foot rim; painted on one main side with two elderly scholars strolling beneath a clump of two pines and one other tree on a path towards a riverside retreat in the countryside, the far bank with a torrent, drifting clouds, and distant hills, the other main side with auspicious objects (a natural rock sculpture, a tripod vessel with branches of flowering prunus, and a beehive-shaped vessel with ring handles), inscribed in draft script with a poetic couplet followed by Wuzi Leyuan hua 戊子樂元畫 (‘Painted by Leyuan in the year wuzi’), with one seal of the artist, Leyuan, in negative seal script, the interior of the bottle entirely washed with gold paint
Zhou Leyuan 周樂元, Studio of Lotus-root Fragrance, Xuannan, Beijing, 1888
Height: 6.07 cm
Mouth/lip: 0.52/.95 cm
Stopper: carnelian; vinyl collar

Provenance:
Wing Hing, Hong Kong (1985)

Published:
Kleiner 1995, no. 379
Treasury 4, no. 477

Exhibited:
British Museum, London, June–November 1995
Israel Museum, Jerusalem, July–November 1997
Christie’s, London, 1999

The intent of washing the interior of this bottle with gold paint was to create the impression of painting on gold paper. There is a long-standing tradition within the literati aesthetic of using gold paper, or gold-speckled paper in some cases, for painting. This mode of painting was rarely transferred to the inside of a snuff bottle, however; indeed, this is the only known pre-modern example, presumably for the good reason that such treatment was hardly necessary, since filling the bottle with the standard yellowish-brown varieties of snuff would have a rather similar effect.

Of one thing we can be reasonably sure: Zhou himself added the gold ground. Absent from this landscape is any of his usual strong blue or green colouring for the trees, foliage, and distant mountains. Other than for the figures, where strong blue is used for their robes, the painting is done mostly just in ink tones with only the slightest trace of very pale blue washes on the trees and mountains. It seems inconceivable that Zhou would have painted his only monochrome landscape had he not intended to gild it.

The inscription comes from a poem on a painting of ‘misty prunus’ (yanmei 煙梅), by Chen Wei 陳烓 (1449 – 1527). We quote the entire poem; the last two lines are what appear on the bottle.

天與孤高第一花，卻從幽谷作生涯。歲寒喜見春風面，漫遣疏煙故故遮。
Heaven has given us the Number One flower, lofty in its solitude;
But it lives out its life in a secluded valley.
In the cold season I am happy to see its lovely spring-breeze face;
Don’t send the thin mists to purposely cover it over!

Zhou seems to have felt no particular inhibitions about the depiction of vessels from the ancient material culture, often changing them whimsically for his own artistic ends. A similarly eccentric ‘ancient vessel’ is seen on Sale 2, lot 49.

The unusual shape of the neck on this bottle is certainly due to damage. It has been ground down a bit, making it unusually narrow for a bottle that is otherwise of a reasonably standard form. It has been very well done, however, by someone with a rather creative approach to the overall problem of repairing damage. Instead of simply grinding out whatever chips there were, the carver has completely remodelled the whole neck, giving it a waisted profile so that it flares at the top. This gives the impression that it might originally have had a different type of neck, and makes the shape look much more comfortable and natural. It may, indeed, have had a narrower neck, even before the damage. The hollowing at the shoulders is unusual for the standard form against which we are comparing it. There is a considerably greater depth of glass left inside at the shoulders than is usual, suggesting the possibility that the bottle might have started life as a more eccentric form in any case.

The single large seal on this bottle is difficult to read with any certainty, but is clarified by the similar and more legible seal that appears on Sale 8, lot 1096.

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.