A banded agate snuff bottle, Official School, probably Imperial, Qing Dynasty, 18th-19th century. Photo Sotheby's

extremely well hollowed, with a concave lip and a recessed flat foot surrounded by a protruding flat footrim, carved with mask-and-ring handles; the tourmaline stopper with a vinyl collar; 5.8 cm., 2¼ in. Estimation 40,000 — 60,000. Lot vendu: 87,500 HKD

PROVENANCE : Collection of Alice B. McReynolds.
Sotheby’s Los Angeles, 3rd October 1984, lot 97.

LITTERATURE: Hugh Moss, Victor Graham and Ka Bo Tsang, A Treasury of Chinese Snuff Bottles: The Mary and George Bloch Collection, vol. 2, Hong Kong, 1998, no. 295

NOTE: The mask-and-ring handles bring this bottle into the category of relief carving. They are of the most common style of the eighteenth century. It falls into the category of banded-agate bottles, which were a common type for probably a considerable part of the snuff-bottle period. Bands of concentric lines are not only standard to agate, they define it, and in large, evenly formed crypto-crystalline masses, they commonly create large enough areas that if cut through at the appropriate angle, a bottle is formed with plain chalcedony above and below a roughly horizontal band, a band that was supposed to be reminiscent of the broad belt worn by an official. The large numbers of such bottles attest both to the commonness of the material and to the popular appeal of what was done to it. In the case of this bottle, the markings are sufficiently unusual and dynamic to consider their ink-play potential as, perhaps, a landscape.

The likely date for this bottle is the second half of the Qianlong period or the early nineteenth century.

Sotheby's. Snuff Bottles from the Mary and George Bloch Collection: Part VI. Hong Kong | 27 mai 2013 - www.sothebys.com