Bottle ID: 750

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WHITE W/BROWN OVERLAY, CRAB, FISHERMAN, DATED 1884

Date: 1884

Height: 67 mm

Glass, of flattened rectangular form with shoulders sloping to a cylindrical neck with everted mouth, and with a neatly carved oval footrim, carved using the sepia-brown overlay over a white ground with, on one main side, a chrysanthemum flower, with a crab by a spray of millet, a four character inscription in archaic script reading: jiashen chunri (spring day, 1884); the reverse with a fisherman casting his rod and net from his sampan with a seated boatman paddling the boat through the water, beside an overhanging willow on the rocky riverbank; the narrow sides each carved with an inscription in archaic script, one reading: jiashen nianzuo (made in 1884) and the other: Dieyuan zhenwan (for the treasured enjoyment of Dieyuan).

Similar Examples:

Moss, Hugh, Victor Graham and Ka Bo Tsang. A Treasury of Chinese Snuff Bottles - The Mary and George Bloch Collection, Vol. 5, Part 3, 2002, pp. 727-728, no. 1024
Moss, Hugh, Victor Graham and Ka Bo Tsang. A Treasury of Chinese Snuff Bottles - The Mary and George Bloch Collection, Vol. 5, Part 3, 2002, pp. 772-775, no. 1045

Provenance:

Bonhams New York, November 13, 2017, lot 8045
The Elsa Glickman Collection
acquired March 29, 2001
Hugh Moss Ltd.

 

Little is known about the maker's of this group of bottles known collectively as the Yangzhou School, that name given because of the probability that these bottles were made in or near to Yangzhou. Less than 10% of the extant examples bear a cyclical date, and this is the only bottle in the Crane Collection which does. Increasingly, we have come to know more about the owners and collectors who commissioned these bottles as their names (or artnames) are carved from the overlay color, sometimes within a raised oval seal and occasionally, as is the case here, along the narrow sides of the bottle as part of an inscription. The owner's names that appear most frequently on this group of bottles are Li Junting, Yunting, and Wang Su (1794-1877), who was a painter and literatus from the Yangzhou area. Less frequently seen are names such as Xu Nong, Qiutang, Jifang and Dieyuan. Interestingly, the most similar bottle to the Crane Collection example is the Bloch Collection bottle no. 1045 listed above. It is the same shape, the same color combination and has the same style of archaic script down the two narrow sides. That bottle reads: in the third month of the year dingmao (1867) Jifang commissioned Sun Shihua to make this. It seems possible that we can also attribute the production of the Crane Collection bottle to the same maker, Sun Shihua.

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