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Lot Essay
It is rare to find porcelain snuff bottles enameled in the famille-verte palette which in no way pretend to be from the early-eighteenth century, when such enamels were standard. It is also rare to find them with reign marks. The famille-rose palette was the standard from the Yongzheng period onwards, and most Imperial porcelain was decorated with it when enameled.
The rendering of the geese is unusually fine and artistic. This subject of numerous geese and reedy banks was popular in paintings from the Song dynasty onwards, one of which no doubt inspired the scene here. The artist shows off his graphic talents by presenting the geese in all their different activities: flying, turning in flight, taking off, landing, standing on the grassy bank, swimming, diving, and so forth, to demonstrate his mastery of the subject.
An intriguing feature of this bottle is the number of geese. Often with snuff bottles depicting a reasonably large group of anything (geese and monkeys, for instance), there are either sixteen or eighteen of them. This may be a reference to the two standard groups of luohan, so popular in Chinese art.
An unmarked meiping-form porcelain bottle with very similar painting of geese on a riverbank is in the Princeton University Art Museum and is illustrated by M. C. Hughes, The Blair Bequest, p. 182, no. 231, while a Daoguang-marked porcelain bottle of rounded-rectangular form painted with a similar scene is in the Palace Museum, Beijing and illustrated in Snuff Bottles-The Complete Collection of Treasures of the Palace Museum, p. 224, no. 342.
The rendering of the geese is unusually fine and artistic. This subject of numerous geese and reedy banks was popular in paintings from the Song dynasty onwards, one of which no doubt inspired the scene here. The artist shows off his graphic talents by presenting the geese in all their different activities: flying, turning in flight, taking off, landing, standing on the grassy bank, swimming, diving, and so forth, to demonstrate his mastery of the subject.
An intriguing feature of this bottle is the number of geese. Often with snuff bottles depicting a reasonably large group of anything (geese and monkeys, for instance), there are either sixteen or eighteen of them. This may be a reference to the two standard groups of luohan, so popular in Chinese art.
An unmarked meiping-form porcelain bottle with very similar painting of geese on a riverbank is in the Princeton University Art Museum and is illustrated by M. C. Hughes, The Blair Bequest, p. 182, no. 231, while a Daoguang-marked porcelain bottle of rounded-rectangular form painted with a similar scene is in the Palace Museum, Beijing and illustrated in Snuff Bottles-The Complete Collection of Treasures of the Palace Museum, p. 224, no. 342.