Lot 77

Lot 77
Treasury 6, no. 1215

A moulded famille rose porcelain ‘Shoulao’ snuff bottle

(‘Framed Good Fortune’)

Famille rose enamels on colourless glaze on porcelain; with a slightly convex lip and concave foot surrounded by a convex footrim; moulded and painted on each main side with an oval panel, one with Shoulao, the God of Longevity, standing on a formalized cloud and holding a peach, a crane perched on another cloud, surrounded by further formalized clouds and with a bat flying overhead, all on a background of formalized waves, the other main side with the other two Star Gods, representing good fortune and wealth, one holding a ruyi sceptre, the other a hu tablet, also standing on and surrounded by formalized clouds, also on a ground of formalized waves, each panel framed by two bats and surrounded by the emblems of the Eight Immortals set on a middle plane of formalized clouds with some of the upper plane undercut to leave it free standing; the foot inscribed in seal script, Jiaqing nian zhi (‘Made during the Jiaqing period’); the lip, neck rim and footrim painted gold; the interior unglazed
Imperial kilns, Jingdezhen, 1796–1820
Height: 6.91 cm
Mouth/lip: 0.59/1.97 cm
Stopper: gold, turquoise-green, and iron-red enamel on colourless glaze on porcelain; silver finial; original

Lot 77 Provenance:
Sotheby’s, London, 24 April 1989, lot 279

Published:
Kleiner, Yang, and Shangraw 1994, no. 162
Treasury 6, no. 1215

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

Lot 77 Commentary
This is one of the more impressive moulds from the height of the art form. It is unusual for the group as a whole in having its decoration in framed panels. In Qing ceramics, panels of decoration, often surrounded by formalized floral patterns, are common, but with the development of the much more sculptural moulded porcelains of the last decade or so of the eighteenth century there was less need for the panels. Painting on the flat surface of a porcelain vessel tended to reflect the painter’s art, in which it was natural to frame a picture in some manner, whereas moulded porcelain bottles were more sculptural and tended more towards the carver’s arts. It is relatively rare, therefore, to find classically-framed designs on this group of bottles. Other unusual features here are found in the use of the Eight Buddhist Emblems as a secondary design filling the areas around the main panels and the combination of deep undercutting of the surrounds (giving the impression of a reticulated bottle) with panels of standard relief work.

Comparison with other bottles evidently from the same mould (see discussion in Treasury6) indicates that, whereas the designs for the main decoration were dictated by a mould, the foot and neck on this model were added and hand carved, resulting in different details. A bottle apparently from the same mould and with similar enamelling, to judge from the black-and-white illustration, was in the Walters Collection, formed in the 1870s and 1880s (Bushell 1980, p. 21, fig. 48). There is an unusual beige porcelain version that appears almost identical, but may be from another mould, in the Seattle Art Museum (Fuller 1970, pl. 40). Others are an iron-red monochrome in the Gulland Bequest of 1905 to the Victoria & Albert Museum (White 1990,plate 113, no.1), and an unusual turquoise-glazed example in the Denis Low Collection (Kleiner 1999, no. 153). There is also another version of this design known in the form of a compressed spherical bottle with circular panels surrounded by a beaded frame (Stevens 1976, no. 283).

Like Sale 1, lot 139, this bottle has an original stopper with a separate, metal finial, although here in the form of a simple, hemispherical cabochon of silver. Since it would have been easy to make a purely design-driven finial by, for example, gilding an integral porcelain finial to resemble gilt bronze, it seems that these metal finials had a practical purpose: to fix the spoon more firmly in place than could be done by just gluing it into a small indentation in the porcelain stopper. In our collections today, glued spoons of that kind are constantly coming unstuck. We have carefully dismantled this stopper and, sure enough, the finial attaches to a thin, cylindrical silver tube that pierces right through the stopper and provides a firm setting for the spoon that, by this means, has a cylindrical holder 7 mm long, rather than a small indentation no more than a millimetre deep. The difficulties of dismantling the stopper demonstrated to us, even after two hundred years, how successful this idea was.