Bottle ID: 00431

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PURPLE, TRANSLUCENT, OCTAGONAL FACETED W/PANELS

Date: 1740-1820

Height: 60 mm

Glass, of octagonal faceted form with raised panels on the front and reverse, blown and carved as diagonally segmented quatrefoils, the straight neck ending in a wide mouth, of translucent vivid purple tone.

Imperial, attributed to the Palace Workshops, Beijing.

Similar Examples:

Crane Collection no. 271.
Lawrence, Clare.  The Alexander Brody Collection of Chinese Snuff Bottles, 1995, p. 62, no. 88.

Provenance:

Asian Art Studio
Sotheby's, New York, March 22, 2000, lot 158
A Mid-West Collection

Exhibited:

Annual Convention ICSBS Toronto, October 2007

Despite its lack of grammatical structure, the Chinese language is far more descriptive in its extenisve vocabulary than the majority of Western languages.  This is particularly evident in the subtleties afforded to colors of materials such as glass and jade, which give color tones a more complex meaning.  Purple, in a number of differing tones, is listed in the Archives within the "blue" group of colors.  As a composite color of red and blue, purple is given as "zi" in Chinese.  This brings to mind (at least for the educated eighteenth century Chinese) a small cluster of stars next to the Polar Star called "ziweiyuan", "The Wall of Purple Tenuity" which was the site of Shangdi's palace in the heavens.  On this earth, its counterpart would be the Forbidden City, "Zijincheng".  Even for the twenty-first century Westerner, being armed with this knowledge at a most basic level, allows one to comtemplate this purple glass bottle with its Imperial attribution in a new light.

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