AN INSIDE-PAINTED GLASS 'FISHERMAN' SNUFF BOTTLE ZHOU LEYUAN, 1889

Hugh M. Moss Ltd., 1980.
Collection of Gerd Lester, 1986. 

Robert Kleiner, Chinese Snuff Bottles in the Collection of Mary and George Bloch, British Museum, London, 1995, cat. no. 380.
Chinese Snuff Bottles in the Collection of Mary and George Bloch, Israel Museum, Jerusalem, 1997. 
Christie’s London, 1999.

Hugh Moss, Victor Graham and Ka Bo Tsang, A Treasury of Chinese Snuff Bottles: The Mary and George Bloch Collection, vol. 4, Hong Kong, 2000, no. 479.

The outer lip has a couple of minute nicks and the outer foorrim has a few tiny nibbles. The inside painting has been well preserved.
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Here the bottle is inscribed for Xingwu, but it is likely that Xingwu was the eventual recipient rather than the patron, although there is one intriguing possibility. The name Xingwu was also that of Sun Xingwu 孫星五 the snuff-bottle painter. It is just possible that Zhou knew Sun and presented him with this bottle, perhaps in the process inspiring him to become a painter himself. Once Sun Xingwu himself began to paint, he faked a Zhou Leyuan bottle with a dedication to himself (Sale 5, lot 113).

However, Xingwu was not an uncommon name; it might have been shared by any number of people in the capital at that time. As a commercial artist, it is questionable how often Zhou would have spent his time making gifts for others when he could have been earning a living. Finally, Sun Xingwu did not begin to paint until several years after the date on this bottle, suggesting that if he was inspired by it, it either took a while to sink in, or he was a slow learner.

On the other hand it may be significant that Sun’s fake Zhou Leyuan with a dedication to himself is also dated very early for Zhou, suggesting the possibility that Sun might have known Zhou over a period of time before becoming a snuff-bottle painter himself, and knew how early Zhou had begun to paint.

In studio condition, the painting here represents Zhou’s ‘Blue Period’ at its best, with unusual and powerful renditions of two of Zhou’s most popular themes, the auspicious objects and the landscape, although the landscape is a rare one, with its large-scale pines and the fisherman heading home across a plank bridge. The pines are the forerunners of the standard large pine tree subjects of his last few years, but here sit half-way between the earlier, small clumps of pines in monumental landscape settings and the later, more intimate paintings where the pines take over and the landscape is merely a setting for them (see, for instance, Sale 2, lot 66, the finest and grandest of his later paintings of pine trees as the main subject).

The balance of the auspicious objects on the other side is, yet again, completely satisfying with calligraphy and seals offsetting the objects and an exquisite formal tension set up by the positioning of the various auspicious elements. The placing of the teapot, in particular, bespeaks an artist in total control of the formal side of his art. Set partly obscured by the crackled vase, it subtly continues the line of the jardinière of calamus grass, providing a strong horizontal anchor to hold the powerful diagonal of the rock and the vertical elements of the vase of peonies and the calligraphy and seals.

There is an interesting variation of Zhou’s studio name here, which is seen on Sale 6, lot 145. Instead of using the usual form of zhai to mean ‘studio’ he has substituted the term shuxuan, but the meaning remains the same. There is little doubt that it is still the same place in his home at Xuannan but for some reason he has altered the nomenclature.

It should be noted that the phrase translated ‘encompass antiquity and take in all the modern’ is the name of one of the forty scenic spots and its associated complex of buildings in the eighteenth-century Yuanming yuan. But there is no reason to think that Zhou Leyuan was trying to paint an idealised version of that scenic spot; the phrase was very common in other contexts, as well.