A CYLINDRICAL PUDDINGSTONE SNUFF BOTTLE QING DYNASTY, 18TH / 19TH CENTURY

Sotheby's New York, 6th April 1990, lot 75. 

Robert Kleiner, Boda Yang, and Clarence F. Shangraw, Chinese Snuff Bottles: A Miniature Art from the Collection of George and Mary Bloch, Hong Kong Museum of Art, Hong Kong, 1994, cat. no. 246.
National Museum of Singapore, Singapore, 1994-5.

Hugh Moss, Victor Graham and Ka Bo Tsang, A Treasury of Chinese Snuff Bottles: The Mary and George Bloch Collection, vol. 2, Hong Kong, 1998, no. 213.

A small area of the neck has been slightly polished. There are a few polished nicks to the exterior footring, including one flake of approx. 0.1 cm with an associated short hairline extending upwards to about 0.5 cm. The stone has numerous characteristic inclusions and typical pittings. The actual bottle is of a deeper tone than the catalogue illustration.
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NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF BUSINESS PRINTED IN THE SALE CATALOGUE."

This variety of quartz puddingstone is distinguished by the breccia matrix made up a host of jagged fragments visible to the naked eye. An identical piece of stone, presumably from the same specimen and made by the same workshop, is in the J & J Collection (Moss, Graham, and Tsang 1993, no. 74).

Similar snuff bottles have the palace-style upper neck rim and tapering form that suggest this type of puddingstone might have been carved at and for the court. A further link between this cylindrical form and the court is to be found in a series of cylindrical glass bottles, many of imperial colour and attributable to the court (see, for instance, the ruby glass example in Au Hang 1993, no. 11, which is very similar in shape to this example). Others are known in white nephrite of exactly this form, (see, for instance, Au Hang 1993, no. 99). The existence of a range of different materials in identical form alerts one, as always, to the possibility of an imperial source.

This simpler form may well reflect the deliberate choice of the artist to tame the busy pattern of the material.