Bottle ID: 00417

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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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