AN INSIDE-PAINTED GLASS 'LADY AND FAN' SNUFF BOTTLE YAN YUTIAN, 1895

Jade House, Hong Kong, 1985. 

Christie's London, 1999.

Hugh Moss, Victor Graham and Ka Bo Tsang, A Treasury of Chinese Snuff Bottles: The Mary and George Bloch Collection, vol. 4, Hong Kong, 2000, no. 616.

Apart from a few barely perceptible nibbles to the outer lip and a slightly polished nick to the outer footrim, the overall condition is very good. The inside painting has been well pereserved.
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This is one of Yan Yutian’s rarer and more impressive subjects. Even the side decorated with various auspicious symbols is of an unusual selection and composition, but the lady leaning languidly out of her window gazing wistfully at a blossoming tree is unrecorded elsewhere in his output.

Even for an artist who favoured the use of white in his palette, this is an exception where the colour predominates to give the impression of an exercise in painting with white and ink alone. There is a pale sepia wash used to define the lip of the circular window out of which the young woman leans, the chestnuts are painted in brown, and there is the palest wash of brown mixed in with white on the lotus root to give it body, but otherwise, the whole painting relies on only ink and white pigment.

This glass bottle is typical of the Beijing school of Zhou Leyuan, and one can assume that the same workshops supplied all of these Beijing artists at the turn of the century. Yan used glass predominantly throughout his career; most of it was in this typical Beijing-style bottle, although he did use other shapes occasionally. Later in his career he also produced a series of much larger, more globular bottles, probably from the same source despite the difference in form. These large bottles are seldom as exciting as his smaller ones, and it is possible that they were produced as much for tourists, who were becoming more commonplace in Beijing in the early years of the twentieth century, as for serious snuff-takers.