A WHITE JADE ‘BAMBOO SHOOT’ SNUFF BOTTLE POSSIBLY PALACE WORKSHOPS, QING DYNASTY, QIANLONG / JIAQING PERIOD

well hollowed, carved in the form of a bamboo shoot, the stone of an even white tone; with  a jadeite stopper

Robert Hall, London, 1992.

Chinese Snuff Bottles: A Miniature Art from the Collection of George and Mary Bloch, Hong Kong Museum of Art, Hong Kong, 1994, cat. no. 49.
National Museum of Singapore, Singapore, 1994-1995.

Hugh Moss, Victor Graham and Ka Bo Tsang, A Treasury of Chinese Snuff Bottles: The Mary and George Bloch Collection, vol. 1, Hong Kong, 1996, no. 68.

The tentative attribution to the Palace workshops is based on two factors: the hollowing, which is otherwise excellent but leaves an exaggerated depth of base (here 0.86 cm), and the speckled and slightly flawed nature of the material. The former is apparently a feature of the Palace workshops and court use of material that was not inherently valuable seems to have been a standard for the mid-Qing period.

The carving here is not only superbly done as both overall sculpture and detail, it is also very cleverly devised to disguise the texture of flaws in the material with a lot of surface detail and changes of plane. A naturally rather formal subject is subtly relieved of its absolute formality by the detailing of the narrow sides, where the tips of the leaves of the shoot are curved very slightly either to one side or the other.