Four kesi silk panels, circa 1900. Photo Dreweatts & Bloomsbury Auctions.

finely woven with scholars amid mountainous landscape scenes, circa 1900, 23.5cm high and 23.5cm wide. Estimate £800-1,000

Mountainous scenes featuring scholars were a popular motif decorating brush washers, boxes, porcelain wares and paintings, in Chinese art, especially that dating to late imperial China. Mountains in China were highly regarded, especially by the scholarly elites, for their naturally high peaks, conceived as the closest connecting point to heaven, and connection with the life giving element of water. The theme of the educate scholar retreating in the mountain has been examined, predominantly, in connection with periods of political turmoil: the Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove, thought of being formed in the 3rd century AD, begun to surface in literatures but also in tombs and paintings following the collapse of the Han dynast and the period of instability coinciding with the establishment of the Six Dynasties (AD420-589). By the Tang dynasty, a set of four principal aesthetic qualities for the rocks had emerged, consisting of thinness, openness, perforations, and wrinkling and the Song produced the first manual on stone connoisseurship, Du Wan’s Stone Compendium of Cloudy Forest, which had a great impact on the history of collecting stones. From the Ming dynasty, manuals providing instructions on how to build garden containers, as the Hua Jing and the Yun Lin Shipu, coincidently surfaced mentioning the rules and values of the life of the learned men and describing rocks as the necessary constituents of the environments where the learned men could retire from the world and pursue his passions.

For reference see Jessica Rawson, Cosmological systems as sources of art, ornament and design,’ Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern antiquities , 2000, p. 133-89; Alf Stein (1990), The world in miniature : container gardens and dwellings in Far Eastern religious thought, 1990.

二十世纪 山水人物图丝绒幛 四件

Dreweatts & Bloomsbury Auctions. Chinese Ceramics and Asian Works of Art. 17th May 2014. http://www.dreweatts.com/