A DENDRITIC AGATE ‘CARP’ SNUFF BOTTLE OFFICIAL SCHOOL, QING DYNASTY, MID-18TH / MID-19TH CENTURY

very well hollowed, with a flat lip and a recessed, very slightly convex foot surrounded by a protruding flat footrim, carved with a cameo design wrapped around one main and two narrow sides of a large carp in a lotus pond, defined by a line of formalized waves above the foot; the agate stopper with a silver collar

Collection of Gerd Lester.
Collection of Pauline Lester.
Sotheby’s New York, 17th March 1997, lot 214.

Chinese Snuff Bottles, Hong Kong Museum of Art, Hong Kong, 1977, cat. no. 198.

Hugh Moss, Victor Graham and Ka Bo Tsang, A Treasury of Chinese Snuff Bottles: The Mary and George Bloch Collection, vol. 2, Hong Kong, 1998, no. 312.

There is a slight unevenness of surface on the back to remove a flaw in the stone (likely to be original). Otherwise the condition is very good.
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The separation of the relief plane from the ground plane on this bottle is so convincing that, with the design mainly concentrated on three sides and the lower half of the bottle, the relief carving appears to be almost temporarily applied to a perfectly formed plain, compressed spherical bottle. As so often with this school, the relief functions primarily to raise an essentially two-dimensional image to a higher plane. There is no attempt to detail the edges of the three or four millimetres of depth of carving, which are mostly left plain except for the lotus stems, which are carved convincingly in an attempt at three-dimensional reality. A similar approach to the other details would have left them awkwardly squared-off.

Although the neatness of the foot detail, with its broad, flat footrim and almost flat recessed foot, and the impeccable hollowing would allow a late Qianlong date for this bottle, it is perhaps as likely to date from the first half of the nineteenth century.

This squat, globular form was a popular one in ceramics during the Daoguang period. Another chalcedony example from the Bloch collection, sold at Bonhams Hong Kong, 23rd November 2010, lot 50, proves beyond doubt that superb quality combined with excellent detailing was still possible in the Daoguang period, even if no longer the invariable rule. It is possible that this whole sub-group of green dendritic cameos was mostly made during the first half of the nineteenth century.