Bottle ID: 443

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BLACK CARVED WITH CRANE

Date: 1830-1870

Height: 74 mm

Porcelain, of flattened pear shape with a long slender neck, and recessed oval foot, carved in relief with a design on one side of an egret standing amongst reeds and grasses with a butterfly swooping above and a moth flying below, the reverse with a bird in the branches of a leafy tree, with flowering chrysanthemums nearby, all covered in famille-verte enamels in tones of green, white, yellow and aubergine on an overglaze black ground, the foot inscribed with an apocryphal four character black enamel mark in seal script Kangxi nianzhi, made in the Kangxi period, beneath a transparent green glaze.

Attributed to Jingdezhen.

Similar Examples:

Crane Collection no. 926
Miller, Tony and Humphrey Hui. Elegance in Relief: Carved Porcelain from Jingdezhen of the 19th to Early 20th Centuries, 2006, p. 330, no. 163.

Provenance:

Hugh Moss (HK) Ltd.
Sotheby's, Hong Kong, May 3, 1995, lot 620
A private Canadian Collection

Although of an extremely rare colour combination for the group, without the enamels this would be a typical nineteenth century carved porcelain from the group of potters including Wang Bingrong, Chen Guozhi, and other individual porcelain carvers of the Daoguang period and later. Here, the carver has drawn upon the black-ground famille-verte wares of the Kangxi period for his inspiration, adding an apocryphal mark. The mark cannot have been expected to fool anyone, since it would have been widely understood among snuff-bottle collectors in the nineteenth century that such a bottle was contemporary.

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