1890年 料胎內畫「山水樓榭」圖鼻煙壺 周樂元製 《庚寅二月於藕香書軒周樂元作》款

with a slightly concave lip and a recessed convex foot surrounded by a protruding rounded footrim, painted with a continuous landscape scene in which a fisherman in a straw raincoat and hat punts his boat near a river bank with willow trees and an open pavilion, with two gnarled old pine trees and a mountain temple in the foothills of distant mountains, inscribed in draft script ‘[Executed] in the second month of the year gengyin at the Studio of Lotus-root Fragrance by Zhou Leyuan’, corresponding to 1980, with one seal of the artist, yin (‘seal’), in negative seal script; the tourmaline stopper with a vinyl collar

北京市工藝美術品總公司，約1963年
Hugh Moss 收藏
Robert Hall，1984年

《盈寸纖研 ─ 瑪麗及佐治伯樂鼻煙壺珍藏》，香港藝術館，香港，1994年，編號316
新加坡國家博物館，新加坡，1994-1995年
倫敦佳士得，1999年

Hugh Moss、Victor Graham 及曾嘉寶，《A Treasury of Chinese Snuff Bottles: The Mary and George Bloch Collection》，卷4，香港，2000年，編號481

There are a few very minute polished chips to the outer lip of the bottle. The painting is in very good condition. The spoon has been broken off to prevent scratching the painting in the bottle.
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This poetic idyll in blue is a unique work for Zhou Leyuan in that it is, right in the middle of his career, experimental in one significant respect: it is, to some extent, a unique inside-painted ink-play painting. To the main trees and some of the hills beyond them, Zhou seems to have added pools of water into the ink and colours after he had put them on, allowing a partially random running of the colours, both outwards and into each other. This has created the misty and magical effect that permeates the work. It is particularly obvious in the dark area of foliage just below the temple, but it is also clearly visible from the narrow sides, where there are random multiple, rippling lines left by water seeping across the pigment, which is carried with it until it dries in a sharp outline. Had it just been the area of trees, one would be tempted to assume that perhaps someone had damaged the bottle with water at a later stage, despite the difficulty of accidentally confining an area of water so precisely on the inside of a bottle without damaging the whole painting. The use of this technique permeates the painting, however, and may be intentional, thus constituting a unique departure from his normal method of painting foliage, as unlikely as this may seem.

This is the one of two examples in this collection where Zhou has varied the name of his studio, using the alternate form shuxuan to replace zhai ('studio'), with the other also being in the Bloch collection, illustrated by Moss et al., 1996-2009, vol. 4, no. 479.