Bottle ID: 356

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OCTAGONAL, SLIP DECORATED

Date: 1800-1850

Height: 58 mm

Stoneware; of brown clay with a beige slip, of octagonal section with eight vertical varying facets, leaving two main sides larger, with a cylindrical neck and concave oval foot; decorated on three sides with a waterside landscape with a country pavilion, a figure fishing from a rock and another poling a sampan beneath the sun, with distant mountains and birds; the other main side with a design of a bat flyng over lotus plants.

Attributed to Yixing.

Similar Examples:

Crane Collection no. 152
Moss, Hugh, Victor Graham and Ka Bo Tsang. The Art of the Chinese Snuff Bottle - The J & J Collection, 1993, Vol. I, pp. 422-423, no. 253.
Kleiner, Robert. Chinese Snuff Bottles from the Collection of John Ault, 1990, p. 115, no. 205.
Hui, Humphrey K. F. and Christopher C. H. Sin. An Imperial Qing Tradition - Chinese Snuff Bottles from The Collections of Humphrey K. F. Hui and Christopher C. H. Sin, 1994, p. 49, no. 45.
Sotheby's, New York, September 14, 2010, lot 31, The Joe Grimberg Collection.

Provenance:

Hugh Moss (HK) Ltd.
Dr. Giovanni Caretti
The Ko Collection (Beijing, 1923)

This bottle is by the finest of the slip decorators of Yixing, active during the first half of the nineteenth century and recognizable by an idiosyncratic style. The majority of early slip decorated snuff bottles are likely to be by the same workshop. For one of the most famous, possibly made for the Court, see Moss, Graham, Tsang, The Art of the Chinese Snuff Bottle, no. 253, and for an intriguing example bearing a cyclical date corresponding to 1840 (but just conceivably to 1780), see An Imperial Qing Tradition, no. 45. Since another documented slip-decorated example is dated to 1822, however, it is more likely that the later date is accurate.

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