Lot 146

Lot 146
Treasury 5, no. 978

Dragon Handles

Transparent pale orange, emerald-green, sapphire-blue, turquoise-blue, pale yellow and milky glass, the first four colours with streaks of brown, suffused with air bubbles of various sizes, some elongated; with a flat lip and approximately oval foot made up of elements of the design; carved as a single overlay with five chi dragons and a flying bat, the foot in the form of a lotus leaf resting on a footrim carved as what are probably intended to be other aquatic plants
Attributed to the imperial glassworks, Beijing, 1740-1780
Height: 7.24 cm
Mouth/lip: 0.78/1.10 cm
Stopper: tourmaline

Lot 146 Provenance:
Sotheby’s, London, 7 June 1990, lot 92

Published:
Kleiner, Yang, and Shangraw 1994, no. 111
Treasury 5, no. 978

Exhibited:
Hong Kong Museum of Art, March-June 1994
National Museum, Singapore, November 1994-February 1995

Lot 146 Commentary
We know that by the early Yongzheng period cameo-overlays were being produced, and the first ones were probably made during the last decades of the Kangxi reign. The likely evolution of the type would have been from single-colour cameos, which we find listed in the records of Yongzheng imperial glass production, to the use of more than one colour. Thence the natural progression would be to multi-coloured single-plane overlays, such as this one, although it should be noted that these are prepared in a quite different manner from single colour overlays. Once production of multi-coloured single overlays had been achieved, glassmakers were faced with a dizzying array of potential colour combinations, and it would not have been long before someone began experimenting to discover how many colours could be used simultaneously.

The chi dragons here might indicate an imperial product, and for work of this high standard the imperial glassworks seems the most likely source, with the carving carried out at the palace jade-carving workshops. The streaking seen here is a feature commonly found on the finest glass overlay carvings of the eighteenth century (and possibly some from the early nineteenth).