An Emerald-Green and Cinnabar-Red Glass Snuff Bottle Qing Dynasty, 18th / 19th Century

Moss et al., 1996-2009, vol. 5, no. 702.

Suffused with air bubbles, some burst at the surface and filled with dust giving white appearance. Otherwise, good condition.
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Viewed with transmitted light, what appears to be a black ground here is quite obviously dark, transparent emerald-green, although true black glass does exist.

Glass with inclusions of other colours at the surface was among the easiest to produce and seems to have been, not unnaturally, a popular standard from the early eighteenth century to the end of the Qing dynasty. To achieve these effects, the glassblower collects a gather of one colour on the blow-iron and, during the manipulation process, lays cold fragments of another colour on the marvering surface, simply rolling the gather across them. This can then be re-heated to completely blend them together, and whatever pattern is created can then be further manipulated as the gather is blown, allowing for the surface design to be twisted and stretched as required. In this case, cinnabar- or lacquer-red glass has been rolled deeply into the gather and integrated by blowing. The single splash of cinnabar-red on each main side results in what appears to be a true opaque black where it meets the green ground. It is possible that one way of achieving opaque black was by mixing the two colours.

For other examples with cinnabar-red splashes in a dark green ground, possibly from the same workshop, see Lawrence 1995, no. 122, which features the same distinctive, streaky marking in the red, and Christie’s, New York, 21 March 2000, lot 108.