Lot 124

Lot 124
Treasury 4, no. 438

The King of Fragrance

Crystal and ink; with a flat lip and protruding concave foot surrounded by a flat footrim; painted on one main side with a fisherman talking to a woodcutter, with the inscription ‘Executed in imitation of the brushwork of Gao shangshu (‘Gao, President of the Board [of Punishment]’)’, the other main side with an encomium on snuff, followed by the signature ‘Yiru jushi’, the four narrower panels containing two separate subjects, one of an orchid flowering near a convoluted rock, inscribed ‘Executed in imitation of the brush manner of Shitian’, followed by the signature ‘Zhongchang’ and ‘The King of Fragrance’, followed by the Manchu signature ‘Yun Jeng’, the other of bamboo growing near rocks, inscribed ‘Recorded on a winter day in the year yichou,’ followed by the signature ‘Banshan’, and ‘There is no Dharma outside the mind’, the inscriptions all in regular script, with the exception of the last, which is in clerical script
Bottle: 1760–1805
Painting: Yiru jushi, attributed to Beijing, winter, 1805
Height: 6.4 cm
Mouth/lip: 0.52/1.9 cm
Stopper: jadeite; vinyl collar

Lot 124 Provenance:
The Kaynes-Klitz Collection
Sotheby’s, Hong Kong, 30 October 1990, lot 161

Published:
Snuff Bottle Review, edited by Michael J. Kaynes, nos. 5 and 6, May and
June 1975, p. 7
JICSBS, Winter 1990, p. 41
Arts of Asia, March–April 1991, p. 165
Kleiner, Yang, and Shangraw 1994, no. 296
Treasury 4, no. 438

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

Lot 124 Commentary
The President of the Board of Punishment, Mr. Gao, refers to the painter Gao Kegong (1248–1310). Shitian was the hao, or literary name, of the famous Ming scholar-painter Shen Zhou (1427–1509), and the ‘King of Fragrance’ refers to the orchid.

Yiru jushi was one hao or sobriquet of Hongwu (d. 1811), a grandson of the Kangxi emperor accomplished in poetry, painting, and calligraphy. If Hongwu is our artist (we have no direct evidence to prove it), it would help explain his mention of Gao Kegong as a source. Gao was a Uighur, an outsider and to the Chinese a barbarian, who attained a high post in the alien Mongol dynasty that ruled as the Yuan dynasty. Hongwu was an outsider, a Manchu, who achieved high position under the alien Manchu rulers of Qing China.

The encomium on snuff inscribed on one of the main sides of the bottle reads:

Brought from beyond the seas, this herb of the immortals from beyond the passes:
Its flavour in the bottle can be endlessly praised.
At the early court, one sniff clears the mind and eyes;
On a night journey, a tiny scoop will protect one from the pestilential vapours.

Several of Yiru jushi’s bottles bear Manchu signatures. There are two: Jun Weng doo zin (‘Jun Weng, follower of the Dao’), which appears only on one bottle in the Mack Collection (Sotheby’s, New York, 25 October 1997, lot 377) and Yun Jeng, which appears here and on all the other known examples with Manchu signatures.