Two Enamelled Silver, Gilt-Bronze and Glass ‘Imitation Baroque Pearl’ Snuff Bottles Qing Dynasty, 18th / 19th Century

Robert Hall, London, 1987.

Moss et al., 1996-2009, vol. 7, nos. 1662 and 1663.

First bottle: Extensive cracks throughout the glass, down and round the bottle. Thumb sized indentation on one side, two further smaller indentations. Second bottle: Two tiny pieces missing form the blue enamel and one piece of the mantel is bent outwards very slightly. One tiny crack in the glass coming down the bottle from the base of the mantel. Two very slight indentations.
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In Sale 1, lot 138 and Sale 3, lot 133, there was a sampling of snuff bottles that one can only assume were made for the court, probably during the mid-Qing period. They are of various materials, with a range of shoulder mantles and necks in gold, enamelled metal, or gilt metal, and inlaid with either gemstones or glass imitations of them. Two other pearlized glass examples, of slightly different shape but with a similar neck and shoulder mantle, were in the Blucher Collection (Moss 1971a, p. 101, no. 165) and the Topper Collection (Sotheby’s Hong Kong, 3rd May 1995, lot 504). Two more were in Sotheby’s, New York, 22 March 2001, lot 253, and Christie’s, London, 14 June 1971, lot 162 (from the Ko Collection). One further bottle is obviously related and was in the J & J Collection (Sotheby’s New York, 1st June 1994, lot 697, and Christie’s New York, 22nd March 2007, lot 84). The J & J example is also of pearlized glass; it is of vegetable form, but the separate neck is in the form of a calyx, tied around with a knotted cord, and is made of pale coral rather than embellished metal.

There are several indications that the series was made mostly at Guangzhou for the court. A great many imperial works of art were produced at this southern port for the court during the height of the Qing dynasty, from the Kangxi through to the early Daoguang reign. Transparent enamels, for example, may have been used at both Guangzhou and the palace workshops, but they are more typical of the former. (Sale 7, lot 16 is one example.) Some of the group have inlaid glass imitations of sapphires, emeralds, and rubies, which was a standard Guangzhou technique for decorating the large number of clocks made there for imperial use. The related pair of bottles, Sale 1, lot 138 and Sale 3, lot 133, are likely Guangzhou products, and one major clue perhaps lies in the shape of the necks of all four examples, all being made of well-gilded bronze and all widely flared or waisted.

The obvious intention here was to imitate baroque pearls. Pearls large enough to make snuff bottles are rare, though one must always acknowledge the famous one in the Oakland Museum collection, with its lovely jadeite embellishment turning it into an eggplant, and Sale 1, lot 138. To make glass imitations of pearls, however, was easy enough. The intention would not have been to fool anyone, certainly not the emperor or his empress, who were surrounded by the real things. Imitations were intended as clever trompe l’oeil to beguile the eye rather than cheat it. The idea was similar to imitations in ceramics of materials such as wood, bronze, marble, puddingstone, baskets, and so on.

One of these bottles has cracks in the glass, and from it we can see that the glass is extremely thin, certainly never intended to survive alone. The inner material is far more substantial than the glass, and may be several millimetres thick. For some reason, it was felt that a combination of glass no more than 1 mm thick with a pearlized back and a substantial inner layer of some sort of creamy-white composition would best imitate a pearl. The inner material was also obviously intended to provide the main strength to the fragile coating of glass.