A Chalcedony ‘Scholar and Horse’ Snuff Bottle Suzhou, School of Zhiting, Qing Dynasty, 18th / 19th Century

Colonel Kedzior.
Lydia Tovey.
Sotheby’s London, 24th and 28th April 1987, lot 700.

JICSBS, Winter 1992, front cover.
Moss et al., 1996-2009, vol. 2, no. 370.

Outer lip polished to remove small chip, still partly visible. Otherwise good condition.
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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."

The subject of a horse in its natural state in the wilderness, often shown rolling joyously on its back, was a fairly popular one in post-Tang art and by the late Ming and Qing dynasties had become a standard image.

The scholar who sits calmly watching the untrammelled horse delighting in its freedom and, therefore, by reflection his own, wears a loose-cowl head-dress similar to that of the figure picking prunus in Sale 4, lot 5, and the figure of Meng Haoran in Sale 7, lot 25. Obviously they cannot all be intended as the same person, which suggests that this was one of the alternative dress modes in the School of Zhiting for depicting a scholar at ease.

This is another masterly carving of the Zhiting School applied to certain standard pictorial elements. There are low relief groups of serrated-edge rocks, ledges with roughly vertically carved rockwork sides, and others with horizontally serrated rocky sides. The pine trees of this school are epitomised here with two trees, one low on one narrow side in front of the horse, the other on the main side above its rump. Both are composed around darker markings in the material used as formalized pine-needle-clusters, and the balance between the darker foliage and the network of trunk and branches carved from the ground colour as usual is characteristically inspired. Given the use of the natural markings in the stone as the foliage, it would be difficult to imagine a more satisfying composition of branches and trunk.

The hollowing here is well done in that there is a perfectly controlled, evenly profiled, well finished inner oval to hold snuff; but while adequate, it is far from extensively hollowed. The walls are thick, even by the standards of this school, and the bottle correspondingly heavy. Accepting that both these and a great many of the Official School bottles are eighteenth century, made at a time when function was still a vital factor in snuff-bottle production (regardless of the already well-established trend of treating them also as collector’s items or works of art transcending their function), one must conclude that differences in degree of hollowing was entirely a matter of fashion, and the fashion adopted by this school was for the heavier, less extensively hollowed bottle.

The foot on this example is also typical. Along with thinly hollowed bottles, a protruding foot rim was very much the exception with the School of Zhiting. As a rule, they were simply flattened and oval in shape, sometimes with the carving continuing beneath the foot as on Sale 1, lot 25, where the colour of a carved detail in the main design continued under the foot, although there are examples with a protruding flat oval (Sale 1, lot 14) and with a concave oval (Treasury 2, no. 371) foot. With the flat oval foot it was quite common to find, as one does here, the lines of the main design running into the foot, making the oval slightly irregular in places.