Bottle ID: 00417
TURQUOISE, GREEN, OVOID FORM - MINIATURE
Date: 1736-1850
Height: 37 mm
Glass, of small ovoid form, with shoulders ascending to a straight neck and wide mouth, and the body tapering to a neatly carved footrim, of opaque turquoise-green tone, possibly in imitation of turquoise.
Possibly Imperial, attributed to the Palace Workshops, Beijing.
Similar Examples:
Crane Collection nos. 123 and 499
Crane Collection nos. 418 and 419
Snuff Bottles of The Ch'ing Dynasty: Catalogue of an Exhibition at the Hong Kong Museum of Art, 1978, p. 417, no. 38.
Provenance:
Hugh Moss [HK] Ltd.
Jin Hing & Co., April 1999
Exhibited:
Annual Convention ICSBS Toronto, October 2007
This miniature glass bottle is a delight in many ways. There were a large number of miniature snuff bottles made at Court, particularly in glass and as the eighteenth century wore on, in a myriad of differing colors. The Archives of the Imperial Household Department in 1736, the first year of Qianlong's reign, list the following order for the Glasshouse: "green, olive, small snuff bottles, four, make" (Archive # 3375), showing that even as early as the beginning of the reign, small was beautiful. The Chinese loved imitation and the greenish-turquoise color of this bottle is highly suggestive of the stone, turquoise. Accordingly, the bottle listed above, as a similar example, is carved from turquoise with a Yongzheng nianzhi mark incised on its base and is even smaller than this glass example.
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