An Amber Snuff Bottle Qing Dynasty, 18th / 19th Century

Robert Hall, London, 1983.

Moss et al., 1996-2009, vol. 7, no. 1575.

A small chip to the inner lip and a scratch across the foot. Otherwise good condition.
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Snuff-bottle collectors conventionally label a distinctive type of amber that includes opaque ochre or clay-like colouring as ‘root amber’, the belief being that it was created by transparent brown or golden brown resin mixing with earth around the roots of the tree before the fossilization process began. This hypothesis sounds sensible enough, so it was never questioned among snuff-bottle collectors, but apparently earth and roots have nothing to do with the real process involved. Amber experts today consider that the colour is due to massive calcite inclusions seeping into the resin long after it has left the tree. The term ‘root amber’ is probably too well embedded to be changed at this point, however.

There is a Chinese term, ‘sparrow brains’ (quenao 雀腦), that could be used for this type of amber, but it must be observed that as far as one can determine, the sole place where sparrow brains is associated with amber is a work on snuff and snuff bottles by Zhao Zhiqian 趙之謙 (1829–1884), a calligrapher and painter of some importance. In his Yonglu xianjie《勇盧閒詰》, Zhao states that ‘yi zhong za song gen zhe, cheng quenao’ 一種雜松根者，稱雀腦 (amber mixed with pine root is called ‘sparrow brains’). Many writers allude to this passage, sometimes mentioning Zhao Zhiqian’s authorship, sometimes not; but while this gives the impression that sparrow-brains amber is a universally recognized and accepted term, one never finds it actually used by dealers, collectors, or museums. In the National Palace Museum in Taiwan, for example, some bottles we might recognise as ‘root amber’ are simply called ‘amber’; one in variegated amber that resembles this bottle, but admittedly with much less dark material, is called ‘beeswax’ (mila, written 蜜臘 in this case, but also written 蜜蠟), which is a term generally associated with a lighter, creamy colour of amber but also even darker amber. In any case, one shall continue to use root amber in English and quenao as its Chinese equivalent: the former is well-recognized in the English-speaking world, and the latter, cited and well described in the nineteenth century, gives us a serviceable term in the twenty-first century, if one only takes care to use it in actual practice and in a consistent manner.

For other spectacular examples in this collection, see Sale 1, lots 123 and 128; Sale 2, lot 32; and Sale 3, lot 26. An example in the NPM of material very much like some of these but called simply ‘amber’ is here.

The surface of the present example is covered with an unusually fine network of crizzling, the frequent fate of old amber snuff bottles, but here it is so fine that one can see it only with the aid of a lens.

The combination of this form and a protruding flat foot provide some clues for dating. Many of the glass bottles that have been excavated from tombs in and around Beijing as the city has grown over the past few decades have a foot of this type, and several are of this shape, some of imperial yellow colour. The tombs date from throughout the Qing dynasty and are not opened through controlled, orderly excavations, so there is never any reliable information as to the date of any particular burial, but many of them contain bottles from the eighteenth century and even from the early years of that century. The court, as we know, distributed very large numbers of snuff bottles to various officials and other members of the influential minority over the years, particularly glass ones. A high proportion of the glass bottles found in tombs seem to have been imperial. This protruding, flat foot appears to have been an early option for bottles made at the court. If such a design was standard for glass, it might easily have been adopted in other palace workshops. There are no other particular indications that this is imperial, but equally no reason why it should not have been.

There may appear to be a minor discrepancy in the provenance cited here, since it was published in a Spink & Son Ltd exhibition in 1983, but it does come from Robert Hall; Hall simply lent it to Spink & Son for that particular exhibition.