An Inside-Painted Crystal ‘Boy and Water Buffalo’ Snuff Bottle Ye Zhongsan, Fourth Month, 1897

Moss et al., 1996-2009, vol. 4, no. 515.

Bottle: Natural icy flaw across the lip, not a crack. Painting: Studio condition.
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It is probable that the only artist to have adopted the literary name Guyue shanren (‘Ancient Moon Hermit’) is a calligrapher named Hu Yingen 胡寅根, but his dates are 1888 – 1936, making him suspiciously young for the date on this bottle, not to mention the fact that he is not known as a painter. It is possible that Ye Zhongsan simply made up a name based on the Guyue xuan (‘Ancient Moon Pavilion’). Why he should attribute this style to an imaginary artist, however, when it is so clearly in the style of and following the subject matter of Zhou Leyuan, is a mystery. Ye constantly reverted to the style of Zhou throughout his career, even adding his signature and an appropriate apocryphal date on a regular basis to create actual forgeries.

Both subjects and style here are lifted directly from the master’s output, and only minor differences in artistic personality would separate the two artists were it not for the honest signature in this case. Another indication of Ye’s pattern-book repetition is to be found in the way the water buffalo is painted. In Sale 5, lot 30, dated 1893, Ye copied the standard Zhou Leyuan image of the water buffalo wading through shallow water with its head turned back across its body and facing down into the bottom, right-hand corner, but he misunderstood the anatomical detail of the beast. Instead of painting it from his own observations, as Zhou had, he copied Zhou’s image and put the right fore-leg in an awkward position. Here, the error is not as blatant, but the rendition is still mildly unconvincing. Having copied it once, Ye repeated it with the same shortcoming without any attempt to bring the image into consonance with anatomical reality as he progressed.