Bottle ID: 00468

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OPAQUE W/RED OVERLAY, DRAGONS

Date: 1720-1760

Height: 63 mm

Glass, of flattened rounded form, tapering to a wide mouth and with a neatly carved footrim, overlaid with ruby-red on an iridescent ground (through burial) and carved with a continuous design of three intertwined coiling chi dragons with three raised bosses.

Imperial, attributed to the Palace Workshops, Beijing,

Similar Examples:

Masterpieces of Chinese Snuff Bottles in the National Palace Museum, Taiwan, 1976, p. 47, no. 68.
Moss, Hugh, Victor Graham and Ka Bo Tsang. A Treasury of Chinese Snuff Bottles - The Mary and George Bloch Collection, 2002, Vol. 5, Part 2, p. 448, no. 881.

Provenance:

Hugh Moss [HK] Ltd.
Michael C. Hughes LLC.

Exhibited:

Annual Convention ICSBS Toronto, October 2007

The condition of this bottle suggests that it has been buried, hence the degraded roughly hewn surface turning to iridescence which is particularly noticeable on the once colorless glass ground. Unusually the red overlay seems to have suffered less from the bottle's burial than the ground, the reason for this being uncertain. The style of the dragons and the crispness of the carving, quite apart from the condition, suggests that this is from the earliest phase of overlay carving at Court, possibly from the late Kangxi period through to mid-Qianlong.

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