Lot 850: A FINE BLACK AND GREY JADE SNUFF BOTTLE

1720-1850

Of flattened form with an oval concave foot, well hollowed from stone of striated black tones with a light grey inclusion encircling the mid-section of the bottle, stopper
2 1/2 in. (6.31 cm.) high

Hugh M. Moss Ltd., London, September, 1974
Hong Kong Museum of Art, 1978
Christie's New York, 1993
Empress Place Museum, Singapore, 1994
Museum fur Kunsthandwerk, Frankfurt 1996-1997
Percival David Foundation of Chinese Art, London, 1997
Naples Museum of Art, Florida, 2002
Portland Museum of Art, Portland, Oregon, 2002
National Museum of History, Taipei, 2002
International Asian Art Fair, Seventh Regiment Armory, New York, 2003
Poly Art Museum, Beijing, 2003

Chinese Snuff Bottles No. 2, p. 57, fig. 3.
Snuff Bottles of the Ch'ing Dynasty, pp. 99 amd 137, no. 157.
JICSBS, Winter 1984, p. 13, fig. 20.
Moss et. al., The Art of the Chinese Snuff Bottle, The J & J Collection, vol. 1, no. 54.
Silver Kris, January 1997, p. 48, fig. 4.

H. R. N. Norton
Sotheby's London, 5 November 1963, lot 128
Hugh Moss

There is a series of black and white nephrite bottles from the eighteenth century where simple bands of white are used to striking effect on otherwise undecorated bottles. Apart from the sheer delight of a superbly made plain bottle of elegant shape, two associations with other arts add immensely to the meaning of the 'subject-matter' of the natural material.

There was a type of marble, mined in Yunnan province in south-west China, where natural markings in the stone suggested images when appropriately sliced. The colouration of the stone included darker markings on a pale grey, beige, green or white ground. If the stone was sliced at an angle, these markings were transformed into evocative natural landscape paintings. They were then inscribed like traditional paintings with titles, poetic commentaries, and often the date and signature of the "artist": either the maker or the connoisseur who acquired it. They are known in the West as 'dreamstones', and in China as 'Dali stones', after the town which was the centre of their production. To the influential minority they were the equivalent, at their best, of great paintings and were correspondingly valued. Two examples are illustrated by Gerard Tsang and Hugh Moss, Arts from the Scholar's Studio, Hong Kong, 1978, nos. 22 and 120. A comparison with the latter in particular helps to identify one possible subject of this bottle as a moody landscape of great power with a band of clouds running across the face of a mountainous gorge, receding in diagonal layers into the distance.

A second association can be made through a highly valued type of Duan stone. One variety of this material is of a purple colour with bands of green running through it. Pieces with a single band running through a block of purple became known as 'jade belt around the middle' stones because they suggested a sumptuous purplr robe enclosed in a jade belt. This may symbolise a wish for advancement in the Civil Service. Such materials were immensely valued, and therefore, in practice, reserved for the influential minority who would understand them. By extension any piece of stone ringed by a different colour in this way might convey the same association.

Whatever the interpretation, this remains one of the finest of the genre, and was one of a small group of bottles gathered together by the legendary London collector/dealer of the 1950s, Henry Norton.