Lot 3797. A superb pair of bronze 'mythical beast' paperweights, Song-Yuan dynasty. Estimate 350,000 — 450,000 HKD. Lot sold 437,500 HKD. Photo: Sotheby's.

each naturalistically cast in the form of a mythical beast crouching and facing forward, their taut muscular bodies well pronounced, one with the head of a goat, its long curved horn and beard meticulously articulated, the other with a dragon's head and depicted looking ferocious with an open mouth, the bronze patinated to a deep brown colour - 5.7 cm., 2 1/2  in.

Provenance: Collection of Karl Schmidt, prior to 1950.

Notes: The present two bronze animals are exceptional in their extraordinarily fine quality and attention to detail which suggests that they were cast using the lost-wax method allowing the craftsman to achieve greater detail, particularly difficult and challenging with miniature figures such as these two weights. While their function is not clear, it is quite likely that they belong to a small group of cast bronze objects made as trinkets, as paper or scroll weights. Compare, for instance, smaller but less refined weights, illustrated in Rose Kerr, Later Chinese Bronzes, London, 1990, pls. 72 and 73.

The exquisite detail of the casting on all sides, including the finely and very realistically worked base of both animals, conveys a realistic naturalism and suggests that they were meant to be handled and viewed from close-up in order to fully appreciate their refined beauty. Such small objects of great artistic and highly tactile quality were made in a variety of materials mainly for the amusement and delight of the scholar-literati from the Song dynasty onwards. With the appearance of brush rests and washers, small weights in animal shapes, such as two small stone weights in the form of mythical beasts discovered in a Southern Song tomb at Zhuji Xian in Zhejiang province, appear and show the appropriation of often exquisitely worked animal figures by the educated elite, see Jessica Rawson, Chinese Jade from the Neolithic to the Qing, London, 1995, p. 356, fig. 10. The present naturalistically rendered pair of beasts show strong similarities to small and exquisitely carved sculptures of animals, such as a the figure of a small recumbent camel in the Palace Museum collection, illustrated inZhongguo yuqi quanji, vol. 5, Beijing, 1993, pl. 245, and a fine jade carving of a deer unearthed near Beijing and attributed to the Northern Song, illustrated in Zhongguo meishu quanji. Gongyi meishu bian, vol. 9, Beiing, 1991, pl. 235.

The present pair of mythical beasts allowed their owner to contemplate the auspicious creatures of the universe representing a concrete realisation of the powerful, protective creatures otherwise rarely to be seen. Possibly believed to have been antiquities even at the time they were made, they may also have enabled their owners to access and grasp the past from which they were believed to have come.

Sotheby’s. Fine Chinese Ceramics and Works of Art, Hong Kong | 08 oct. 2014, 03:00 PM