清十九世紀 青花「課子圖」鼻煙壺

紐約蘇富比1997年3月17日，編號432

Hugh Moss、Victor Graham 及曾嘉寶，《A Treasury of Chinese Snuff Bottles: The Mary and George Bloch Collection》，卷6，香港，2007年，編號1281

Crackled glaze. Good condition.
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It is extremely unlikely that porcelain snuff bottles made for a popular market during the latter part of the Qing period would have been made as one-off designs. The ceramic industry at Jingdezhen was set up for mass production, and once something was designed, it would have been made in series (although not usually in sets, as were made for the court) until it no longer commanded a market. Although this may seem a rare model now, at the time many more would have been made. Others are known with the same design and only minor variations in detail. Given the delicacy of porcelain and the fact that these objects were handled and passed around regularly, attrition over time would have been significant; we should expect that if three or four survive today, then possibly dozens might have been made originally.

Here is what is believed to be typically Daoguang painting style, in this case on the specially prepared beige porcelain ground known as huashi 滑石. It is in the late-Qianlong era that wide mouths first began to appear, judging by one extant blue-and-white bottle with five-clawed dragons from the late Qianlong period that has a wide mouth (Hall 1993, no. 11), but the innovation would logically have become more popular, with still wider mouths, when the fashion for scenting snuff overnight with flower petals took hold, which was probably at some time in the first decade or two of the nineteenth century. This fashion may have been sustained for a while before losing steam, but the production of wide mouthed bottles becomes more sporadic in the second half of the nineteenth century, probably maintained only to service a dying breed of die-hard enthusiasts too old or too obstinate to follow the newer trends in snuffing into unfamiliar territory.

In Treasury 6, the commentary on this snuff bottle cited Zhou Jixu’s 周繼煦 late-nineteenth-century remarks on mouth sizes. For some reason, it was thought he had ascribed the trend for large mouths to the Daoguang era, but in fact the relevant passage in his Yonglu xianjie pingyu 勇盧閒詰評語 does not mention any time frame. Here, for the record, is the relevant paragraph from the Suxiangshi congshu 粟香室叢書 edition (1886 – 1887):

For the most part, bottles for scenting snuff have large mouths. In the evening one removes the stopper and uses fragrant flowers to stuff the mouth. They are left overnight and then removed. The mouths on foreign bottles are smaller. The mouths that are really small, called ‘stick-incense mouths’, are presently very much out of favour.The scene painted on this bottle is not coherent spatially or architecturally. The background seems to be an inventory of the elements one might find in various views at a fine residence, with no serious effort to articulate their relationships or even to put the same design on the panels on either side of a door; the foreground rocks and foliage are present simply to provide some kind of frame at the bottom of the picture.