Description
Description: Chinese botryoidal agate snuff bottle. This is a typical case of snuff bottles that at first glance might not be particularly attractive to the untrained eye. However, it has a lot to say to an educated eye, which will certainly notice subtle details such as the slightly flared neck, the concave mouth, the perfect hollowing, the shape of the body that, incredible as it may seem, is not so graceful on any modern bottle that tries to copy it. It is worth to comment the thin inclusions of this bottle; with a bit of imagination, one could see them forming a hedgehog at the top, a bat below it and a brown lingzhi fungus between them, see the last two pictures. That is funny because it is all natural, unlike what happens on the so-called shadow agate bottles, where the inclusion is thick and shaped by the lapidary. This is what said by a friend expert lapidary who too is a snuff bottle collector, commenting the inclusion of this bottle:
“I bet the lapidary worked the original rough piece of agate in a way that he first brought this very thin layer of inclusions to the surface and then shaped the rest of the bottle out of the remaining rough. Very skilled! I have always much more appreciated the skill it takes to be able and see inclusions within the rough piece and bring them to the surface like this, compared to those that “chase inclusions””.
Foot/base: Flat base
Mark:
Dating: 18th / 19th Century.
Material: Botryoidal agate
Size: 50 mm high
Stopper: Greenish jade stopper with black glass collar and bone spoon.
Provenance: The same collector of the agate snuff bottle S82
References:
Notes:
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