Response and Responsibility

13 at the time of his lecture since although the bottle had been published in the auction catalogue of the Ko sale (Christie ’ s, 10 June 1974, lot 183), no acquisition date was given ( fig. 3 ). Emily Byrne Curtis, my old sparring partner on other contentious issues, has long argued, with the full weight of the late Schuyler Cammann at her shoulder, that the Shunzhi bottles are fakes. I have argued that they are genuine, for a number of reasons; all of which, at the time, seemed to me to hang together splendidly. Part of my argument in favor of the authenticity was that despite the alarmingly growing numbers of Cheng Rongzhang bottles suggesting they might not be genuine, it seemed even less likely they were fakes. Let us assume they were made some time between the Daoguang period and 1921. Why would someone invent an entirely new category of snuff bottles, not based on anything known to have existed at the time, and then use a totally unlikely way of signing his wares? Why would the bottles themselves exhibit a wide range of often very convincing wear, in some cases suggesting excessive use? Why indeed, unless the forger was extremely clever and thought that by doing so he could get away with it, and it seems more and more likely that he did, for close on a century! This is not the time or place to explore the thought more fully, but, as an aside, it occurs to me that any faker whose wares pass muster as genuine for more than fifty years, should be considered an artist, and a good one at that! The level of creativity involved in successfully faking, particularly if it means inventing an entirely new category of art, seems to me to be little different from that of an artist. Now at present the jury is still out on the Shunzhi bronze bottles but the rumblings from the jury room are alarming. There are still unanswered questions; the bottles When I visited Beijing early in 1974, it was with the specific aim of interviewing Ye Bengqi ( fig. 4 ). I had organized the trip with the help of Adolph Silver, a snuff-bottle collector and economist who had advised the Chinese government since the 1950s and had unprecedented access. I was able to organize a series of interviews with Ye over a period of two weeks and met with him almost every morning for about three hours. I arrived in Beijing feeling like Sherlock Holmes without the silly hat. I had solved a mighty mystery concerning Imperial enamels simply by poring over photographs in my study ( fig. 5 ). I had become convinced that many of the enameled glass wares accepted not only as genuine, but as the height of the art by experts in the West, were in fact fakes, and I had managed to track down the faker because he had made a silly mistake. Ye had been trained by his father to paint inside-snuff bottles in the family studio, and he was one of the two brothers who founded the modern Beijing school of painting. During the 1930s when he produced the finest of his fake enamels, he would may turn out to be a large production by an individual, right at the beginning of snuff-bottle history, who either produced some bottles for the court or perhaps did not feel the constraints of Imperial prerogative so early in the new dynasty. On the other hand they may have been made little more than a century or so ago to fool mainly Western collectors. I am not entirely sure either way, although the evidence against their authenticity seems to be growing, but if I was writing a succinct history of the snuff bottle, I would have little confidence in this group of bottles as a foundation. I am grateful to Dr. Silvio Bedini, who has been interested in this group of bottles for many years, for suggesting, upon receipt of the manuscript of my lecture, a third alternative: that some are genuine while others are late Qing copies of them. At present we must keep an open mind, but I shall be looking at the problem again in greater detail in the forthcoming seventh volume of the Bloch catalogue. The second group of bottles I would like to look at represents a case where an entire group of wares I thought was fake turns out to be genuine. Fig. 5. Ye enamels.