AN INSIDE-PAINTED GLASS 'PORTRAIT OF LIANG DUNYAN' SNUFF BOTTLE MA SHAOXUAN, EARLY 20TH CENTURY

Collection of Dr and Mrs Louis E. Wolferz.
Sotheby’s New York, 3rd October 1980, lot 125.
Collection of Gerd Lester, 1986.

Robert Kleiner, Chinese Snuff Bottles from the Collection of Mary and George Bloch, Sydney L. Moss Ltd., London, 1987, cat. no. 296.
Kleine Schätze aus China. Snuff bottles—Sammlung von Mary und George Bloch erstmals in Österreich, Creditanstalt, Vienna, 1993.
Christie’s London, 1999.

Gengqi Xia, ‘Enameled Snuff Bottles Produced at the Palace Workshops’, Journal of the International Chinese Snuff Bottle Society, Winter 2005, p. 10, fig. 28.
Emily Byrne Curtis, Reflected Glory in a Bottle: Chinese Snuff Bottle Portraits, New York, 1980, p. 15, fig. 20.
Zengshan Ma, Inside-Painted Snuff Bottle Artist Ma Shaoxuan (1867-1936): A Biography and Study, Baltimore, 1997, p. 55, fig. 41.

Liang Dunyan (1857 – 1924), a native of Guangdong, went with the Chinese Educational Mission to study in the United States until the mission was recalled in 1881. He eventually rose to become Minister of Foreign Affairs; in late 1910, he took his sons to the U.S. and left them in Hartford at the high school he had attended. When the 1911 Revolution broke out, he remained abroad. When he eventually returned, he worked for the restoration of the Qing but retired from politics when the mission proved hopeless. (See Edward J. M. Rhoads, Stepping Forth Into the World [Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2011], and Curtis 1980 for more detailed information.)

This is one of a small number of Ma’s portraits that have no inscriptions whatsoever. This seems strange, as the bottles look incomplete and one cannot imagine that either Ma or his patrons would have ordered them that way when the standard for which Ma was famous was a painting on one side and a long inscription on the other. It is of course possible that this bottle was ordered without inscriptions, but it may also have remained unfinished. Dealing with the movers and shakers of a dynasty in turmoil during a period of intense political uncertainty must have been difficult at times. Such important and powerful people cannot have been easy to deal with, and if their attention was distracted by affairs of state from what was probably a minor indulgence for them, one might expect a few unfinished commissions. Perhaps whoever ordered this bottle provided the photograph but no suitable text for Ma to inscribe on the bottle, and it may never have been delivered.

There seems little doubt that this is among the earlier portraits, and Emily Byrne Curtis dates it to 1905–1910, although stylistically it seems that it might even be a little earlier.