A LAC-BURGAUTE LACQUER 'CICADA' SNUFF BOTTLE JAPAN, LATE 19TH / EARLY 20TH CENTURY

Collection of Georgia Roode.
Collection of Russell Mullin.
Collection of Bob C. Stevens.
Sotheby’s New York, 26th March 1982, lot 198.

Très précieuses tabatières chinoises: Collection rassemblée par Maître Viviane Jutheau, L'Arcade Chaumet, Paris, 1982.
Robert Kleiner, Chinese Snuff Bottles from the Collection of Mary and George Bloch, Sydney L. Moss Ltd., London, 1987, cat. no. 208.
Kleine Schätze aus China. Snuff bottles—Sammlung von Mary und George Bloch erstmals in Österreich, Creditanstalt, Vienna, 1993, cover and p.8.

Hugh Moss, ed., Chinese Snuff Bottles, no. 4, London, 1966, p. 37, pl. E.
Bob C. Stevens, The Collector's Book of Snuff Bottles, New York, 1976, no. 1027.
Robert Kleiner, Images of Asia: Chinese Snuff Bottles, Hong Kong and New York, 1994, pl. 19.
Carol Michaelson, 'The Use of Archaism as a Decorative Motif in Snuff Bottles', Journal of the International Chinese Snuff Bottle Society, Winter 2000, p. 10, fig. 27.
Hugh Moss, Victor Graham and Ka Bo Tsang, A Treasury of Chinese Snuff Bottles: The Mary and George Bloch Collection, vol. 7, Hong Kong, 2009, no. 1709.

A chip on the tip of one of the cicada wings. A repair to a chip on the same wing tip. Mother of pearl inlay missing from parts of the design.
"In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective, qualified opinion. Prospective buyers should also refer to any Important Notices regarding this sale, which are printed in the Sale Catalogue.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF BUSINESS PRINTED IN THE SALE CATALOGUE."

This spectacular and famous lac-burgauté bottle was thought to be Chinese by both Stevens (who published it among his favourite bottles as Chinese and eighteenth century) and Moss (when he published it in 1966). Today, a Japanese attribution seems appropriate. Apart from the fact that we now know that the vast majority of lac-burgautésnuff bottles were made in Japan after the Kanagawa Treaty of 1854 and the Harris Treaty of 1858 provided a framework for Japanese exports, there are other indications.

The use of the thin brass lip would be most unusual for a Chinese bottle. The original stopper, a simple, straight-sided one with a domed top and matching design, is very similar in style to others found on a range of Japanese bottles, including most of the butterfly-shaped lac-burgauté bottles (see under Sale 4, lot 147Sale 4, lot 147; another appears on a bottle in the Marquess of Exeter Collection, Chinese Snuff Bottles 6 [1974], p. 19, no. O.47).

The most telling features, however, are the design and the way parts of the ground have been sprinkled with either gold or tiny fragments of abalone shell in a distinctively Japanese manner. Some Chinese lac-burgauté wares do have sprinkled grounds, but the grounds tend to define something pictorially in a particular scene (a wall, a rocky bank, and so on) rather than being used as decorative fillers or border patterns. Japanese design tends to be distinctively different from Chinese design, particularly in borders and other subsidiary patterns, unless, of course, the Japanese maker is copying or faking a Chinese original. In Japanese design, there is a greater tendency towards abstraction and symmetry, whereas Chinese patterns tend more towards symmetry. When inlaying the wings of the insect, a Chinese designer would, for a start, almost certainly have depicted the veins of the wings rather than use a floral pattern of any sort. A Japanese designer would be more inclined to sacrifice the reality of the insect on the altar of design. Even if a Chinese artist decided to use a floral design, he would be unlikely to combine large flower heads with a randomly interspersed floral-diaper design.

The bottle’s Japanese origins are also revealed by the way the floral diaper has been achieved. A Chinese artist would certainly have repeated the same pattern throughout the area where the diaper was used, whereas here the Japanese artist, with his subtler approach to abstraction, has varied the diaper. Parts of it are in abalone shell and in gold foil, and the constituent unit is not a diaper cell as such but a figure that might be described as a ‘Y’ with threefold symmetry, like a tiny three-bladed wind turbine, or a three-armed starfish with each arm rotated 120 degrees from its neighbouring arm. These figures touch at the tips of the blades; if they were all the same colour and were composed of thinner lines, they would appear as quasi-regular rhombic tiling, but because each little ‘starfish’ can suddenly be a different colour of shell or be gold instead of shell, the pattern presents itself as far more varied and interesting. (One's sense of the pattern also changes as one looks at the bottle at varying distances.)

As a final Japanese touch, the tiling has been dusted with gold pigment and partially rubbed off again to give it yet another layer of subtle texturing. This dusting of gold is concentrated on the gold-inlaid cells of the pattern, which never occurs on Chinese wares.

Another point worth making is that the standard Chinese cicada-form snuff bottle depicts a single insect, showing its upper body on one side and its underside on the other. This one is, in fact, two cicadas, since it is shown from the top on both main sides—just like butterflies from the workshop of the Tsuda 津田family (seeSale 4, lot 147Sale 4, lot 147).

When Kleiner published this bottle, he accepted that it was probably Japanese but suggested that it might be from the earlier nineteenth century. This would pose an intriguing possibility: that the Japanese were making snuff bottles for the Chinese market, rather than for a Western export market, prior to 1854. It is possible that traders from the Ryukyu Islands, where it could have been made, exported a limited number of locally-made snuff bottles across the three-hundred or so miles of the East China Sea that separate the islands from Fujian province. This might account for the greater wear that often affects the brownish lacquer ground on the series of bottles represented by this example. This possibility cannot be ruled out entirely, but it is likely that this is simply an unusual product from the broader group of Japanese bottles of the post-1854 era.

The body of this bottle is made of wood, a very light wood. The lip and collar for the stopper are of brass, but the inner neck is lined with silver, another unusual departure from the standard use of a single type of metal for lip, neck, and body.

                  

This remains one of the most spectacular lac-burgauté snuff bottles known, and one of the rarest formally and decoratively. Were Bob Stevens alive today it would still, no doubt, be among his favourites. He lived his later years in Japan and entertained no prejudice against Japanese bottles in his collecting, seeking out with equal zeal bottles from both countries. How he managed to winkle this little treasure out of Russell Mullin, however, remains an untold story, unless Georgia Roode managed to charm it out of Mullin, and then allowed Stevens to have it. The sequence of the original provenance is not made clear in Stevens’ book.