An Inside-Painted Glass Snuff Bottle Sun Xingwu, Sixth Month, 1896

Sotheby’s Billingshurst, 25th June 1991, lot 305.

Moss et al., 1996-2009, vol. 4, no. 566.

Bottle: One tiny chip in the inner lip and two in the outer lip. Two chips in the outer footrim and a further polished out chip. Painting: Scratches, vertically from the spoon.
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Sun Xingwu seems to have gathered his influences eclectically as well as developing his own style of painting and his own repertoire of subjects. His borrowings from both Zhou Leyuan and Ma Shaoxuan were discussed under Sale 5, lot 113, where he used their signatures on his works. Here the debt to Ma Shaoxuan’s influence is almost certainly revealed in the prose inscription on one main side in the manner of Ma. It says a lot about Sun’s confidence as an artist that he would undertake this sort of lengthy and demanding inscription relatively early in his career. The other side probably indicates a debt to Ye Zhongsan, who painted this subject first in the previous year, 1895although neither artist would have hesitated for a moment to borrow an appealing subject, and it is just possible that Sun was the originator of the theme in a lost bottle from 1895. One can be certain that both were painting the same concept.

The composition is similar, with Zhong Kui riding a donkey from right to left, attended by a single demon carrying a potted plant. Even the title is the same for the works of both artists. It is quite obvious that all of the Beijing artists who followed Zhou were quickly aware of any innovations among their fellow artists and equally quick to respond to them. If they mostly lived in the southern part of Beijing, which seems to have been the centre of the art, and probably knew each other, it is hardly surprising that there was so much artistic cross-fertilization between them.

The prose inscription comprises the first eight lines of ‘Preface to Poems Composed in a Spring Evening Banquet Held at the Peach and Plum Garden,’ written by the Tang poet Li Bai (701–762). It reads:

          Now, heaven and earth are but a place where the myriad things in the
          universe pause for the night; and light and darkness [i.e., time] are but a
          passing traveller across a hundred ages. This floating life is like a dream.
          And how often do we really feel happy? The ancients grasped their
          torches and went merrymaking in the night. Truly they had cause to do
          so!