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Lot Essay
With its brilliant colors and exquisite enameling, this extremely rare miniature cloisonné enamel bottle is undoubtedly a product of the Qianlong Palace workshops. The charmingly small size is characteristic of Imperial wares of the period, when miniature works of art exhibiting technical mastery were in great demand, as is the beautifully incised four-character reign mark, which is often found on cloisonné enamel wares produced at the Palace workshops. The distinctive mask-and-ring handles flanking the sides of the bottle are also often found on Palace wares from the Qianlong period. These finely detailed masks, supporting perfectly circular rings, find their exact counterparts in a series of massive bronze cauldrons used for containing water in case of fire, which are strategically placed throughout the Forbidden City in Beijing. See Wango Weng and Yang Boda, The Palace Museum, Peking. Treasures of the Forbidden City, p. 72, lower left illustration.
Less than an inch high, this bottle represents cloisonné enamel at its finest, with a simple, formalized design beautifully disposed on an elegant form, the simple coloring giving strength to the abstraction and the wires well gilded against a perfectly even surface. The artist has chosen to use the traditional palette of enamels, available since the fifteenth century when cloisonné enamel went through its first florescence at the Court, rather than include enamels introduced in the early-eighteenth century from Europe by the Jesuits, thus initiating the so-called famille rose palette.
An identical unpublished bottle is in the Palace Museum Collection, Beijing, and was shown in a slide lecture at the Poly Art Museum on 25 September 2003, by the Curator of Works of Art of the Palace Museum, Mr. Xia Gengqi.
Less than an inch high, this bottle represents cloisonné enamel at its finest, with a simple, formalized design beautifully disposed on an elegant form, the simple coloring giving strength to the abstraction and the wires well gilded against a perfectly even surface. The artist has chosen to use the traditional palette of enamels, available since the fifteenth century when cloisonné enamel went through its first florescence at the Court, rather than include enamels introduced in the early-eighteenth century from Europe by the Jesuits, thus initiating the so-called famille rose palette.
An identical unpublished bottle is in the Palace Museum Collection, Beijing, and was shown in a slide lecture at the Poly Art Museum on 25 September 2003, by the Curator of Works of Art of the Palace Museum, Mr. Xia Gengqi.