A turquoise-glazed incised porcelain 'fish and chime' snuff bottle, seal mark and period of Qianlong. Estimate  60,000 — 80,000 HKD (7,168 - 9,558 EUR). Photo Sotheby's

6 cm., 2 3/8  in. 

Provenance: Hugh Moss (HK) Ltd., 1999.

Literature: Hugh Moss, Victor Graham and Ka Bo Tsang, A Treasury of Chinese Snuff Bottles: The Mary and George Bloch Collection, vol. 6, Hong Kong, 2007, no. 1166.

Notes: This is a rare monochrome snuff bottle that can be confidently dated to the second half of the reign. Pooling of the glaze partly obscures the reign mark, but the character long is still legible. Even without its barely legible mark, the form is from the Qianlong period, with its radically flattened, spherical shape, flared neck, and recessed convex panels on each main side.

How it was fired is an intriguing question, since all exterior surfaces are glazed and there are no signs of any spur marks. That eliminates the standard methods of standing it on an unglazed foot rim, on an unglazed neck, or on spurs. It was presumably fired on a rod of some kind, narrower than the mouth of the bottle and fixed to the sagger in some way so that it could support it upside down. Such a rod could have been inserted into the interior of the inverted bottle where it would leave no mark on the unglazed interior. An inverted position in the kiln is confirmed by the pooling of glaze on the main panels and one thick tear of glaze running from the foot onto one main side. The evidence of pooling of the glaze in the panels also suggests that the bottle rested on its rod at an angle laterally and also slumped backwards slightly.

Sotheby's. Snuff Bottles from the Mary and George Bloch Collection: Part X, Hong Kong, 01 Jun 2015, 10:00 AM