C48 A very fine “Whish for many Children” snuff bottle and original box

Description

Description:  Chinese molded porcelain, polychrome enameled snuff bottle. Like snuff bottle C20, it is molded in high relief with the motif known as “四妃十六子“, which means “Four concubines and Sixteen sons”, a wish for many sons. The molding of this bottle is very fine. This bottle has been found with his original cardboard and silk box, that is important because it tells us that the bottles were not sold with a matching stopper, which was then matched according to the taste of the owner. There is here a picture, taken from “Snuff bottles from China – The Victoria and Albert Museum collection” by Helen White, of overlay glass snuff bottles in their original boxes.

Mark:  Well written apocryphal Qianlong red mark. Either the mark on this bottle and that on our bottle C20 has some variations from the official mark, which happens especially for Qianlong mark, as said at pages 50 – 51 of the monumental Gerald Davison’s “Marks on Chinese Ceramics”.

Dating:  Early 19th century, most probably Jiaqing.

Material:  Porcelain, glazed inside.

Size: 75 mm high

Stopper:  No stopper on this bottle, as for the reason explained in the Description.

Provenance:  Antiquarian market

References:  The last picture is showing a similar bottle sold by Christies. Similar but with more openwork (see Notes here below).

Notes:  The same motif is also on our bottle C20 and the b&w Kangxi jar QBW13. There is here a group of pictures where this bottle is directly compared with our bottle C20. We can see that despite the smaller size of the figures and the faces, they are often even better molded on this bottle than on C20 bottle, which is already of high level. It is important to note that at first glance one could think that these bottles were made by a mold. Instead, the clear differences between our two bottles and the bottles taken for respective references, besides those of all the other examples that we have seen, are telling us that they were hand molded. It is in fact impossible to made them by a two halves mold, due to the protruding details.

An out of curiosity note: within the circle of collectors that we know, among them very long time and important collectors, nobody has ever found or seen a bottle with its original padded box of this type. All them only knew these boxes through the image of the V@A Museum shown above. That means that the surviving ones should be quite rare.