Bonhams 1793 : A rare pale green jade 'bixie' water dropper and cover 17th century

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8 Nov 2012 10:00 GMT London, New Bond Street
Fine Chinese Art
Back to auction 20024

A rare pale green jade 'bixie' water dropper and cover

17th century
The pale stone of even tone, boldly formed as a crouching bixie, its head turned to the left with bulging eyes beneath thickly twisting brows, the mouth formed with a deep circle hollowed from the stone between two large fangs, two stylised wings rising from the front legs and a thick twisted bifurcated tail sweeping over the hind legs, the body of the beast fully hollowed and a small opening on the back with a stopper carved with a smaller coiled mythical beast.
13.4cm (5¼in) long (2).

Sold for £48,050 inc. premium

Footnotes

Provenance: Rare Art Inc., New York, 8 October 1977

Exhibited: Minnesota Museum of Art, Rare Art Jade Exhibition, 1975, no. 7

十七世紀青玉雕辟邪式硯滴

來源: 於1977年10月8日購自紐約Rare Art Inc.

展覽: 於1975年美國明尼蘇達州美術館Rare Art Jade Exhibition展出，並著錄於圖錄編號7

Jade was frequently used for scholarly objects in the Ming and Qing Dynasties, including brush rests, brushwashers, seal paste boxes and water droppers such as the present lot. Compare a similar water dropper from the Palace Museum, Beijing, illustrated in Scholar's Paraphernalia: Classics of the Forbidden City, Beijing, 2009, no.251.

Another similar jade water dropper in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, is illustrated by J.C.S.Lin in The Immortal Stone: Chinese jades from the Neolithic period to the twentieth century, Cambridge, 2009, p.57, Catalogue no.46, where the author notes that Gao Lian's Zun sheng ba jian (Eight Discourses on the Art of Living) contains a description of a white jade bixie made by Lu Zigang, the famous jade carver from Suzhou, with an archaic design and a hollow body to contain water. Such an object is likely to be similar to both the Fitzwilliam piece and the present lot.