Bottle ID: 00924

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YELLOW W/TURQUOISE OVERLAY, CRANE & PHOENIX

Date: 1750-1850

Height: 52 mm

Glass, of flattened rounded form, with a long neck and slightly everted mouth, overlaid with opaque turquoise on an opaque yellow ground and carved continuously with a crane amongst lotus plants and flowers and a phoenix amongst bamboo.

Similar Examples:

Kleiner, Robert. Chinese Snuff Bottles - The White Wings Collection, 1997,
p. 89, no. 56.

Provenance:

Asian Art Studio
Beaussant Lefevre, Paris, France; November 18, 2005, lot 115
A Parisian Family (1920-2005)
Galerie Tournet, Paris, France, 1920

Exhibited:

Annual Convention ICSBS Toronto, October 2007

The color combination of turquoise over opaque yellow occurs very rarely on overlay snuff bottles. The White Wings Collection has a delicately carved overlay glass bottle attributed to the Palace Workshops, which is decorated with intertwined flowers and is stylistically worlds away from this powerful example. The Guo'an Collection had a fine Yangzhou School bottle in the same delicate colors which bore no stylistic resemblance to this bottle, being carved in typical Yangzhou style using a thin overlay layer. As the habit of snuffing and the collecting of snuff bottles spread to wealthy connoisseurs outside the Palace in the second half of the eighteenth century, the glass workshops in Beijing developed at a rapid pace, producing glass which demonstrated not only their technical virtuosity, but also with a dazzling array of colors. The three stylistically diverse bottles mentioned here illustrate that, despite the ability of the glass workers inside and outside the Palace to manufacture glass, blocks of glass were sent from Boshan to Beijing to be melted down and used in the production of snuff bottles and other objects.

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