S39 A puddingstone “Concave base” snuff bottle

Description

Description:  Chinese puddingstone snuff bottle of fat spade form. The nature of the puddingstone is explained in the Notes here below. In this case, black gravels are cemented in gray with some yellow patches.

Foot/base:  Concave base.

Mark:

Dating:  19^h century.

Material:  Conglomerate limestone.

Size:  74 mm high

Stopper:  Brown jade stopper with black collar and bone spoon

Provenance:  Antiquarian market

Reference:  See a similar bottle sold by Sotheby’s in the last picture.

Notes:  Puddingstones are conglomerates of small pebbles and broken gravels cemented together by mineral and stone infiltration/deposits during a process that takes millions of years. It is worth to note that either this bottle than our similar bottle S42 have a metal tube/reinforcement inserted within the neck; the reason should be that of preventing wear due to the fragility of the conglomerate, as it happens also for fossiliferous limestones, see for example our bottle S83.