A Miniature Dark-Brown Aventurine-Glass Snuff Bottle Qing Dynasty, 18th / 19th Century

Moss et al., 1996-2009, vol. 5, no. 773.

Minute nibbles to the inner and outer lip What appears to be a polished chip, bottom right and including a small part of one ring handle. Some very fine surface scratches from use.
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This variety of aventurine glass is as dark as that known anywhere in Chinese art and may indicate local production, in which case there is some suggestion that it is unlikely to predate 1741 (see Sale 4, lot 59). The style itself would suggest that it dates from the mid-Qing period. Not only an authentic miniature but a particularly small one, it suggests a desire for novelty rather than a response to the high cost of snuff in the early period or just a fashion for generally small bottles. The proportions are such that it is the equivalent in the miniature realm of super-thin hollowing or tiny mouths, and far more likely to be a mid-Qing response than one prior to 1741. There is one other possibility, however: Xia Gengqi says that aventurine glass could apparently be made in local workshops in Beijing by the late Qing dynasty (Xia Gengqi 1995, p. 26). The source of this information is not made clear, but it is likely that any secrets of glassmaking at the imperial glassworks would eventually have found their way into the glassmaking culture as a whole, given the nature of palace recruiting for the glassworks. There might have been an early attempt to keep the secrets of aventurine glass securely within the imperial glassworks (despite some limited success in its production at Guangzhou discussed under Sale 4, lot 59). So much time and effort having been directed to discovering how to make the material, it might have been considered, along with ruby-red glass, a secret worth keeping. Only a serious optimist, however, could expect the prohibition to have survived successfully into the nineteenth century. This may be a late Qing bottle with the material made privately, explaining its strangely dark colour, but its quality and the style of the mask-and-ring handles suggest that we are much more likely to be dealing with a courtly product of the mid-Qing period.