ESOTERIC COLLECTING

Fig. 10. Lacquer incised bottle-picture side. memaries accruing to it. l In the body of the main work is the fol– lowing reference, under the head– ing of clystal:' There is a 'moon spirit' (yuepo) type that has beads of water trapped inside it that can move up and down. Here we have an unambiguous ref– erence to precisely this sort of ma– terial. Today this bottle is of an ex– tremely rare material, but Zhao's rather blase passing reference sug– gests that perhaps he had seen more than one, and may not have been referring to this bottle at all, but the reference still adds meaning to this particular work of art be– cause of its geological rarity in the snuff bottle world. A rather obvious, but still little used series of sources for connect– ing bottles to particular inclividuals in history are the many biographi- . cal dictionaries published in Chi– nese and English. In Chinese there are dictionaries of the influential minority, listing them under both their proper names and their art names, including dictionaries of artists and craftsmen. There are even dictionaries of hall names, so that if all that appears on a bottle is the hall name, it is possible to lo– cate a list of people who adopted it. Some are common, such as 'The Fig. 11. Lacquer bottle-picture side with chalk filling. Jade Hall' or the 'Bamboo Hall' for example, and dozens of people may be listed as adopting that name, but others are unique to a single individual. It is unlikely, for instance, that anyone but the fa– mous bottle painter Ding Erzhong adopted the studio name 'The Mountain Cottage of Seventeen Plum Trees,' and others are still more bizarre. A small selection is listed here. Some, such as Hummell's invalu– able pminent Chinese oj.the Ch'ing Dynasty, and the subsequent equiv– alents covering Ming and Republi– can figures are in English, but most are in Chinese and require basic skills in the language.' They are a rich resource, however, and it is worth struggling with the Chinese versions and trying to learn at least enough to look up individuals even if one must then turn to a Chinese reader to translate the information found. Snuff bottles are frequently in– scribed with hall or studio names, makers' names and the names of owners and in many cases it is pos– sible to match these up with infor– mation from the dictionaries to ar– rive at an exciting accretion of meaning to the work of art. Once one can identify a bottle with a par– ticular individual, one is armed with all the additional information and, therefore, meaning, that arises 11 Fig. 12. Calligraphy of lacquer bonle. out of being able to pinpoint the likely date of manufacture and learn about an early owner of the bottle and possibly the person it was made for. It also, of course, provides valuable provenance, which also adds to the meaning of a work of art. Anytlling owned by the Qianlong Emperor, LilIa Perry or Bob Stevens, to name but a few of our own creative minority, has addi– tional resonance absent from a bot– tle without any provenance at all. When using these sources, a con– clusive identification may prove elusive in the majority of cases, but one strikes gold dust often enough to sustain enthusiasm. Bottles with individual inscriptions became more and more popular as the dy– nasty wore on. From the latter paIl of the eighteenth century onwards, scholars became involved in deco– rating their own snuff bottles, usu– ally taking the 'iron-brush' of the seal catver and incising pictures and inscriptions on the softer range of materials such as bamboo, wood, gourd, lacquer, ivory, soft-stones and other materials that could be worked directly without undue in– dustry. With the use of a diamond point, this range was extended to harder materials such as glass, porcelain and hardstones and these form a fascinating body of docu– mentary works of art which we are only just beginning to reveal.