A rare spinach green jade buffalo, Qing dynasty, Qianlong period

Collection of E.R. Butler, acquired in New York, 1992.

This tranquil yet imposing beast belongs to a small group of buffalo carved from large boulders of jade during the late Ming and High Qing periods. Buffalos have long been associated in the Chinese tradition with an idealised rural existence and are frequently depicted in Chinese literati paintings as the reputed mount of the Doaist philosopher and immortal, Laozi. Unlike these paintings, however, depictions of buffalo hewn in jade remain extremely rare, seemingly all produced for an imperial setting, and preserved in some of the world’s most important collections: 

Compare the Goldschmidt Buffalo, exhibited at the influential Ausstellung Chinesischer Kunst, Gesellschaft für Ostasiatische Kunst and Preußische Akademie der Künste, Berlin, 1929, cat. no. 1085; another from the collections of Lord Gladwyn and Sir Joseph Hotung, included in the exhibition Chinese Jade from the Neolithic to the Qing, the British Museum, London, 1995, cat. no. 26:19, where Jessica Rawson describes the piece has having been taken directly from the Summer Palace in Beijing; the Oscar Raphael Buffalo, now in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, which formed part of the Oriental Ceramic Society exhibition Chinese Jade Throughout the Ages, Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 1975, alongside two other jade buffalos, cat. nos 395-7; the Rothschild Buffalo – hewn from a closely related spinach stone – sold twice in our London rooms, 19th April 1937, lot 47, and 9th December 1948, lot 111, and now preserved in the Woolf Collection of Chinese Jade, no. 213, from which it was loaned to the British Museum, London, 2003-2024; and the Ionides Buffalo, later in the Hotchkis Collection, sold in our London rooms, 20th May 1954, lot 101. Compare also the spinach-green jade buffalo from the collection of the Earl of Yarborough, complete with its original Qianlong reign-marked gilt-bronze stand, sold at Wooley & Wallis, 20th May 2009, lot 388.