AN INSIDE-PAINTED GLASS 'LAKESIDE LANDSCAPE' SNUFF BOTTLE DING ERZHONG, 1897

Hugh M. Moss Ltd., 1986.

Robert Kleiner, Chinese Snuff Bottles from the Collection of Mary and George Bloch, Sydney L. Moss Ltd., London, 1987, cat. no. 257.
Kleine Schätze aus China. Snuff bottles—Sammlung von Mary und George Bloch erstmals in Österreich, Creditanstalt, Vienna, 1993. 
Christie’s London, 1999.

Hugh Moss, Victor Graham and Ka Bo Tsang, A Treasury of Chinese Snuff Bottles: The Mary and George Bloch Collection, vol. 4, Hong Kong, 2000, no. 547.

Bottle: Good condition. Painting: Good condition.
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This magnificent landscape painting from the winter of 1897 is of an unusual style for Ding. It is painted in a rather looser manner than usual with as little linear outline as in any of his landscapes. Edges of rock formations are blurred together and integrated in a rather impressionistic manner that is vaguely reminiscent of the style of Kuncan 髡殘, the early-Qing master. No reference is given to indicate Ding’s inspiration here, which is strange in so different a style. As a rule, he quotes his sources, and it seems unlikely that he would suddenly produce a landscape in a style so different from his standard modes of painting without referring to his inspiration.

Whoever inspired him, the painting is superb and one of his great landscape masterpieces, which from an artist from whom masterpieces are standard and expected, is saying something. The overall feeling is irrefutably rustic in both senses of the word as it applies to Chinese painting. It is a rustic setting, obviously, but the term also applies to a mode of painting, and it is probably here that one see the similarities with Kuncan. He was renowned for his rustic style, where heavily worked paintings, overlaid with line, wash, and textural dabs of foliage, appear to be entirely natural and spontaneously achieved in the brushwork style appropriate to the naturalness of the setting. The term ‘rustic’ is a high compliment in Chinese art.

The flat lip here is unusual for the standard glass blanks used by most of the Beijing artists, which may have been made in Shandong province at the glass-making town of Boshan 博山. As a rule, when these bottles have a flat lip rather than a concave one, it indicates that chips have been removed and that whoever repaired the bottle decided not to go to the bother of recreating a concave lip when it was so much easier to just grind the lip flat. Many bottles have had minor damage fixed, and as long as the impact of the original work of art is not compromised it makes no difference and is quite acceptable. This is even truer of an inside-painted snuff bottle, where all one is talking about is a minor adjustment to the frame of the work of art.