A Camel Bone Snuff Bottle and Snuff Dish Qing Dynasty, 18th / 19th Century

Arthur Gadsby.
Sotheby’s Hong Kong, 2nd May 1991, lot 195.

Moss et al., 1996-2009, vol. 7, no. 1563.

Tiny chips to the outer lip. Some minute scratches to the surface from use.
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The Chinese used a good deal of bone in their carvings, the bulk of it probably from camels, but other larger creatures may also have provided some material. The construction here is very practical, since it allows the hollowing to be done without having to work through the tiny mouth. There is a tendency, as a reflex action left over from those heady days of shallow connoisseurship in the mid-twentieth century, to place considerable stress on the degree of hollowing of a bottle. To be sure, when a bottle is hollowed from a solid material through the mouth, a ‘well-hollowed’ bottle is a testament to commitment and technical skill; excellence in this task may also be said to add to the overall aesthetic appeal. However, with ceramic bottles, which are mostly moulded in two parts, glass bottles that are blown, or bottles such as this, no hollowing was necessary to create the space that allows the snuff bottle to perform its practical function. ‘Hollowing’ is simply irrelevant to any judgement as to the artist’s commitment or technical skill. The obvious construction method here is that the drum-shaped frame was carved first, the bottle hollowed through the wide circular openings left on each main side, and the mouth drilled through the frame. Then, two prefabricated convex panels were glued into place to cover the circular openings, and the bottle was polished.

This bottle was probably made in the second half of the Qing dynasty, but it may have been made earlier; there is little to judge from. This drum-shaped form is a rare one for snuff bottles and does not constitute any particular fad or fashion in any known production centre. It just crops up very occasionally in various materials, and apparently from different parts of the empire. The material would obviously have been available to the Chinese throughout the snuff-bottle period, and there is no decoration to judge stylistically. It might have been produced at any time, hence the extended dating range.