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Lot Essay
This is one of the finest of all moulded porcelain bottles to have survived intact from the late Qianlong or early Jiaqing periods when this art flourished and peached its pinnacle. It also retains the original stopper. It is from an extremely rare mould, from which few examples survive, and no others in this pristine condition.
Porcelain snuff bottles appear to have first been made for the Court at Jingdezhen during the last decades of the Qianlong reign. As interest in snuff bottles grew, and the Court obsession with both the habit and the bottles that arose out of it increased, an ever greater demand for novelty had to be satisfied. Gradually the influence of the Palace workshops spread to more distant centres of Imperial production, and so spawned a wider dissemination of Court style among the growing national production.
Porcelain had been moulded since the earliest wares were produced at Jingdezhen centuries before, but seldom with the intricate high-relief designs which characterise part of the earliest recognisable snuff-bottle output. It seems that the source of inspiration for the earliest moulded porcelains were ivory-and-lacquer snuff bottles produced at the Imperial workshops. Sufficient examples exist with Qianlong marks from late in the reign to prove that the earliest examples included a number of monochromes as well as some enamelled wares, but all are stylistically related to Imperial ivory and lacquer bottles. Many of these early bottles are also enamelled or glazed in imitation of these two materials; being either white or a rich deep iron-red which closely resembles cinnabar lacquer. It is likely that the Court sent either designs or Palace snuff bottles in these two materials to inspire the snuff bottle production at the Imperial kilns of Jingdezhen, and that the earliest bottles produced there were direct monochrome copies of them.
The design on this bottle relates closely with that on an Imperial ivory, now in the collection of Charles V. Swain, illustrated on the cover of the JICSBS, Winter 1994. Lilla S. Perry illustrates a cinnabar lacquer in Chinese Snuff Bottles. The Adventures and Studies of a Collector, p. 38, no. 10, attributable to the Beijing Palace with Eight Buddhist Emblems which might very easily have inspired a bottle similar to this one. A moulded bottle with identical decoration, but covered in an iron-red enamel in imitation of cinnabar lacquer, with a Qianlong mark, is illustrated by Robert Kleiner, Chinese Snuff Bottles. The White Wings Collection, p. 129, no. 87.
Porcelain snuff bottles appear to have first been made for the Court at Jingdezhen during the last decades of the Qianlong reign. As interest in snuff bottles grew, and the Court obsession with both the habit and the bottles that arose out of it increased, an ever greater demand for novelty had to be satisfied. Gradually the influence of the Palace workshops spread to more distant centres of Imperial production, and so spawned a wider dissemination of Court style among the growing national production.
Porcelain had been moulded since the earliest wares were produced at Jingdezhen centuries before, but seldom with the intricate high-relief designs which characterise part of the earliest recognisable snuff-bottle output. It seems that the source of inspiration for the earliest moulded porcelains were ivory-and-lacquer snuff bottles produced at the Imperial workshops. Sufficient examples exist with Qianlong marks from late in the reign to prove that the earliest examples included a number of monochromes as well as some enamelled wares, but all are stylistically related to Imperial ivory and lacquer bottles. Many of these early bottles are also enamelled or glazed in imitation of these two materials; being either white or a rich deep iron-red which closely resembles cinnabar lacquer. It is likely that the Court sent either designs or Palace snuff bottles in these two materials to inspire the snuff bottle production at the Imperial kilns of Jingdezhen, and that the earliest bottles produced there were direct monochrome copies of them.
The design on this bottle relates closely with that on an Imperial ivory, now in the collection of Charles V. Swain, illustrated on the cover of the JICSBS, Winter 1994. Lilla S. Perry illustrates a cinnabar lacquer in Chinese Snuff Bottles. The Adventures and Studies of a Collector, p. 38, no. 10, attributable to the Beijing Palace with Eight Buddhist Emblems which might very easily have inspired a bottle similar to this one. A moulded bottle with identical decoration, but covered in an iron-red enamel in imitation of cinnabar lacquer, with a Qianlong mark, is illustrated by Robert Kleiner, Chinese Snuff Bottles. The White Wings Collection, p. 129, no. 87.