ESOTERIC COLLECTING

Fig. 5. Original bottle again. which turns out to be not only highly valued by the Emperor, whatever we may have initially thought of its qualities, but appar– ently exclusively or at Jeast mainly reserved for CCUlt wares of a highly Imperial nature. Because the process of discovering all of this is a lengthy one involving a great deal of peripheral research, by the time we have arrived at this conclusion we have already learned a great deal about the stone, its importance to the Chinese aesthete, and Imper– ial jade carving of the Qianlong pe– riod. Already our unprepossessing little bottle has worked its magic as art on our understanding. Although bear in mind that at present you may be taking this on faith from the research I have done. It will have a similar effect on your understand– ing of Chinese art only when you have followed the same path for ¥ourself. It will take you much less time, since I have just given you my chalts to help you along your way. but you must still travel the . ground yourself before you will really benefit from it personally. Now lees look at the form (fig. 5), We have established in ti,e J & J Cat– alogue, and in the first volume of the Bloch cataJogue that the meipil1g form was a standard at COUIt where snuff bottles copied from ceramic and bronze forms were particularly popular. We have provided fUlther evidence of th.is in the recentJy pub– lished volume 2 of ti,e Bloch book Fig. 6. Bottle without stopper, where we undertake a comprehen– sive review of dle formal qualities of the snuff bottle in general in relation to me qualtZ bottles in the Bloch Collection. Another intriguing forma] feature, which might not strike us at first, is the small, flat rim to the outer lip, anotiler typical Palace feature which we discussed in bom me J & J and the Bloch books. So formally what appeared at first to be a fairly dull shape turns out to have much more significance than was inulledi– ately apparent. Which leaves us with the mildly ungainly weight to cons\c1er: and here:again a Palace provenance is endorsed. Although virtlloso hol– lowing was an option, palticularly eluring dle mid-Qing period, it was only an option and was applied more frequently to some materials than to others. At the Court many bottles were not so well hollowed alongside those that were, and as the eighteenth centUly progressed and wealthy courtiers, and the Im– perial family itself, began to collect far greater numbers of botdes than they could possibly need for hold– ing snuff, the option of adequate but not extensive hollowing was frequently taken up. Another rea– son was that some materials were valued because of their color and to have hollowed them extensively would reduce its intensity, possibly a factor here. Now, let's remove that ugly old stopper (fig. 6) that it might have 9 Fig. 7. Bottle with another stopper. come with originally, although in fact I chose it for mis lecture purely for its lack of suitability in order to demonstrate anotller point in eso– teric collecting. Already it looks a lot more elegant, although, of course, incomplete. Why then, does changing the stopper have anything to do Witi, esoteric collecting? To change a stopper is to become in– volved at a very creative level with the process of snuff bottle art. It is one of the pursuits in our hobby which bridges the gap between artist and audience, another vital tool in understanding art. By choos– ing our own stopper, having con– sidered the form, size, the line of the neck, depth of lip, color of the material and so fOlth, we become intimately involved in the creative process far more efficiently. We are, in effect, changing the dynamic of me physical work of a1t and be– come surrogate artist in this particu– lar case by editing the overall form of the work of art. By becoming more deeply involved in the process, we understand it more deeply. It is impossible to success– fully re-stopper a bottle without having considered all its formal and material qualities, and by doing so our attention is focused on them. Languages of line, color, form and texture are all revealed far more efficiently to those who become directly involved, and to re-stopper a botde is to become directly in– volved in the art.