An Inside-Painted Glass ‘Zhong Kui’ Snuff Bottle Ye Zhongsan, Mid-Spring, 1896

Moss et al., 1996-2009, vol. 4, no. 511.

Bottle: Tiny chip to the outer footrim. Surface scratches and abrasions. Some slightly larger scratches on the reverse side. Painting: Slight marks from the spoon on the left side of the clouds. Otherwise, studio condition.
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The side with the two boys on water buffaloes here is an even balance between Ye’s growing confidence in his own subject matter and his debt to Zhou. Apart from the blue palette, Ye has also borrowed the distant hills with a river and waterfall, although he has included his own typical hillocks (discussed under Sale 4, lot 123). They are very similarly painted here, which is hardly surprising since the two works were made only a few months apart. The stylized hillocks under Ye’s brush begin to resemble the stomach-muscles of a body-builder. The degree of stylisation stems, partly, from Ye’s more pictorial attitude to his art. Zhou was an artist first and picture-maker second; he tended to reconsider such details every time and not slip into a habitual formula. Ye, for whom creating a saleable picture was more important than evolving personal artistic style, tended to stick with a formula for painting a particular subject once he had worked out the best way to do it. In front of these far hills which are, like Sale 4, lot 123, set as a distance and separated horizontally from the foreground by water and mist, are Ye’s evolved boys-on-water-buffaloes. Although the subject was borrowed from Zhou, this is undoubtedly a Ye Zhongsan version of it. The boys are considerably larger than on Zhou’s water buffaloes; in fact one feels a trifle sorry for the beast in the front, who has a lad half his size perched on his rump. This reflects Ye’s growing confidence with figure painting. Although still subdued and not of the frank and colourful opacity of the colours of the boys in Sale 5, lot 80 (in order to harmonize more with the distant mountains), the figures are still typical of Ye’s mature output: more emphatic, and a more important element in the composition.

On the other side is a subject Ye introduced at this time. It is the fabled demon-queller Zhong Kui on a donkey (see Sale 4, lot 79 for the legend of Zhong Kui). He is depicted here as riding through the air on nothing more than wisps of cloud. As always, he is attended by a demon-servant since, having quelled them one might as well put them to work. He carries a potted plant containing a blossoming shrub on his shoulders. Again the subject is more subdued in colouring than in Ye’s later versions, to match the rather Zhou-esque subject of the other side, but is otherwise pure Ye Zhongsan, who had by this time mastered the art of painting horses and donkeys.

The seals here are a departure from Ye’s usual huayin (‘painting seal’). By splitting this seal, which appears on most of his earlier works and was continued into the year 1900, he arrives at the seal yin on its own, which was to become his standard and which begins to appear more often from 1896 onwards.