AN INSIDE-PAINTED GLASS 'TWO BADGERS' SNUFF BOTTLE MA SHAOXIAN, 1904

Sotheby's Hong Kong, 28th October 1992, lot 483. 

Robert Kleiner, Chinese Snuff Bottles in the Collection of Mary and George Bloch, British Museum, London, 1995, cat. no. 423.
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. 626.

The bottle has a chip to the inner lip. There is a minute nibble to the outer lip and inner footrim. There are also some tiny blemishes to the surface. The painting has two tiny areas of wear to the white paint, one on the paw of the badger and the other on the muzzle. There are also a few minor spoon scratches on both sides.
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Ma Shaoxian was the son of Shaoxuan’s older brother Ma Guangyu 馬光宇. He was apparently trained by Ma Shaoxuan in the family business of snuff-bottle painting which, by the time Shaoxian began to paint, was already well established and successful. His first dated works are from 1899, although none of these are the tentative, hesitant works we would expect from a trainee, so he must have begun painting a year or two earlier at least. He also mastered the Ma-style calligraphic inscriptions in ranks of characters on the back of a subject, and probably wrote inscriptions to go under Ma Shaoxuan’s name, as well.

This example is early in Shaoxian’s career, and already his inscription is very much like Ma’s. Given a few more years of practice and an incentive to try hard, there is no reason why Shaoxian could not have done many of the inscriptions that currently go by his uncle’s name. See, for instance, Sale 7, lot 114, for an inscription that for most people would pass as coming from the hand of his uncle.

This subject was first painted by Ma Shaoxuan in 1897 (see Sale 8, lot 1135) and became a family studio standard, painted under both artist’s names from time to time.

In Chinese art, two badgers (huan 獾) symbolize marital happiness (huan 歡).

The poem on the other main side was composed by Han Yu 韓愈 (768–824).

天街小雨潤如酥。草色遠看近卻無。最是一年春好處，絕勝煙柳滿皇都。

The streets of Heaven after a shower are like kumis, rich and slippery;
The colour of grass can be seen from afar, but disappears upon approach.
Indeed this time of spring is the best of the whole year,
Much better than when misty willows fill the Imperial Metropolis.

The ‘streets of Heaven’ are the streets of the capital; tiny blades of grass create a stretch of green when seen from afar, but they are still too sparse to colour the ground when seen close up. In late spring, the scene of green willows in the mist gracing the greatest metropolis in the world in the ninth century may be expected to excite the ordinary poets, but Han Yu takes a contrarian’s position and states his preference for the wet transition from winter to early spring.