An Imperial Beijing Enamelled Gold 'Mille-Fleurs' Snuff Bottle Palace Workshops, Blue-Enamel Mark and Period of Qianlong

Hugh Moss, 1980.
Belfort Collection, 1986.

JICSBS, Winter 1986, front cover.

JICSBS, December 1975, p. 8, fig. 21

Snuff Bottles of the Ch’ing Dyansty, pp. 50 and 132, no. 11

Hong Kong Urban Council, 1978, p. 110

Jutheau, 1980, p. 56

JICSBS, Winter 1986, front cover

JICSBS, Winter 2005, p. 6, fig. 8

Moss et al., 1996-2009, vol. 6, no. 1073.

Miniscule dint in the outer footrim. Some of the red and small pieces of the green enamels missing from the gold lappets. An area of repainting repair just below the gold lappets, approx 14mm by 10mm. To the left of this a small area of damage to the top of the yellow flower.
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Among gifts presented to the Chinese emperors during the early years of the palace workshops were European gold snuff boxes with enamelled decoration. These would certainly have influenced production at court. Gold is a particularly pure metal upon which to enamel, whereas problems often arise with the chemical reaction between enamels and copper or (especially) silver. By the early Qianlong era, however, the minor problems presented by enamelling on copper had been largely overcome. A standard enamelled copper snuff bottle, its lip and foot rim heavily gilt, would be difficult to distinguish from a solid gold one when first presented to the emperor, so it was hardly worth the added expense of using gold, unless more than lip and foot rim were intended to be exposed.

The present example is typical of Qianlong use of a gold ground, with its chased shoulder design of lotus petals, while another approach is represented by the gold bottle in the J & J Collection (Moss, Graham, and Tsang 1993, no. 169), with an elaborate panel framed in chased gold.

An enamelled gold snuff bottle still in the imperial collection in Beijing, is related to the present example, but is even more elaborate, with decoration in a series of raised pendant petal-shaped panels interspersed around the shoulders by raised leaf-shaped panels, all beneath a similar shoulder mantle of gold lotus petals (Li Jiufang 2002, no. 135). Outside of the imperial collection, surviving gold ground snuff bottles remain extremely rare. As a combination of materials, enamelled gold would be even more fragile than enamelled copper wares, since the metal is softer, and any that were damaged would probably have been melted down for their gold content until perhaps the mid-twentieth century, when they again became more valuable as bottles, albeit damaged ones, than as scrap gold.

By the time it is subsumed into Chinese art, the millefleurs design represents splendour and prosperity. The origins of this particular pattern of millefleurs, with its distinctive palette and crowded flowers on a white ground, can be traced back to French enamels of the mid seventeenth century. It is found on a small range of Beijing wares and on some Guangzhou enamels from time to time. A somewhat similar millefleurs design appears as the rope-bordered main panels of decoration on a spectacular early-Qianlong palace-enamelled metal example (Lawrence 1996, no. 4). The flower-head border around the neck of this bottle was one used on other palace enamels during the very early years of the Qianlong reign (see, for instance, the enamelled glass brush pot with European ladies in Moss 1976, plate 35).