拍品 1036
  • 1036

清十九世紀初 水晶内畫「梅竹山水」鼻煙壺 嶺南派製 甘煊文作

估價
70,000 - 90,000 HKD
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招標截止

描述

來源


 

出版

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455

Condition

Bottle: Barely perceptible chip to the outer lip. Surface scratches from wear. Painting: Snuff stained and numerous scratches from the spoon. Some fading to the prunus on one narrow panel and to the poetic inscription on the main panel towards the top. Fading to the seal making it illegible.
"In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective, qualified opinion. Prospective buyers should also refer to any Important Notices regarding this sale, which are printed in the Sale Catalogue.
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."

拍品資料及來源

The main inscription on the back panel here is a very successful in imitation of the style of the great calligraphy master Wang Xizhi. Wang’s letter, written in the middle of the fourth century from the capital to a relative by marriage in Chengdu, reads as follows:

          Last summer I received the walking sticks made from the bamboo of

          Qiong that Your Honour sent; all were superb. The gentlemen here are

          generally respectful of the aged; I quickly gave them out, thereby

          making known the excellence of Your Honour’s kindness from afar.

The indigenous people in the south-western Sichuan region of Qiong produced bamboo walking sticks that were prized by the Chinese. It seems that Wang distributed them to his friends so that they could present them to their aged parents and spread awareness of the relative’s generosity. A bottle by Gan dated 1814 and featuring the same letter is in the Marakovic collection.

The couplet written on two of the smaller panels of the narrow sides is in Gan’s precise clerical script:

          It wants to rain, it’s about to clear,

          enveloped in a mossy colour;

          where the light from the mountains breaks off,

          one can see houses where people live.

The lines are of unknown authorship They appear on a couple of hanging landscape scrolls of very different styles that have appeared recently at auction and are dated 1902 and 1988, suggesting either that the painters took their inscriptions from Gan or that they and Gan took the lines from the same source.

Chinese poets liked to situate their poems at a point of transition, where something is about to happen or has just happened; here the weather is poised between rain and clear skies. They also valued suggestive phrasing that seems somewhat illogical but whose meaning can be intuited from the context: here, the entire scene is ‘within’ the colour of moss, and light that somehow belongs to hills or is characterised as coming from hills ‘breaks off’, perhaps at folds in the mountains. By all of these techniques, the reader is obliged to re-imagine the situation and the views implied by the language, thereby participating in the construction of the poetic world.

This is another of the popular forms of crystal bottle used by Gan during his career. When he used it, he often filled minor panels with vignettes of symbolic plants (here, the bamboo and the prunus, both emblematic of the scholar).

The reddish tinge on the interior of this bottle is due to the colour of the snuff that it once contained. The crystal here is unusually clear and free of flaws, allowing an uninterrupted view of the painting, which with its orange, snuff-filled background, gives the impression of an ancient painting on faded silk. The impression of an antique painting is so powerful that one is tempted to prefer it to the pristine condition of Sale 2, lot 149 and lot 1069 in the present sale. While the snuff may have discoloured certain of the washes over the centuries, the patina of time has more than compensated for the loss.