Footnotes

Treasury 4, no. 467


玻璃內畫鼻煙壺
內畫：周樂元，北京，1884年

Autumn Delight in Nature

Glass, ink, and watercolours; with a flat lip and recessed convex foot surrounded by a convex footrim; painted on one main side with two scholars seated on a plateau beside a river and beneath autumn trees in a mountainous gorge, inscribed with a dedication in draft script with one indecipherable seal of the artist, and on the other main side with a group of auspicious objects (a natural rock sculpture, a vase with mask-and-ring handles decorated with several examples of the trigram qian from the Eight Trigrams, containing branches of flowering prunus, a jardinière containing calamus grass and a tripod incense burner with 'heaven-soaring' handles), inscribed in draft script with a poetic inscription followed by 'Written in the eleventh month of the year jiashen by Zhou Leyuan following the ancient style'

Zhou Leyuan, Studio of Lotus-root Fragrance, Xuannan, Beijing, eleventh month, 1884
Height: 7.49 cm
Mouth/lip: 0.57/1.62 cm
Stopper: coral; stained walrus-ivory collar
Condition: Bottle: the lip probably reduced to remove chips, leaving it slightly off the horizontal; miniscule chip in outer lip. Painting: slight snuff staining and minor spoon marks, but otherwise in excellent condition


Provenance:
N. C. Shen
Gerd Lester (1986)

Published:
Kleiner 1987, no. 264
JICSBS, Spring 1988, front cover
Arts of Asia, September–October 1996, pp. 84 and 85, fig. 21
Treasury 4, no. 467

Exhibited:
Sydney L. Moss Ltd., London, October 1987
Creditanstalt, Vienna, May–June 1993
Christie's, London, 1999

Commentary
The inscription on the side with the auspicious objects is derived from a heptasyllabic quatrain entitled 'Peonies,' composed by Pi Rixiu (circa 834–883), a Tang poet gifted with many literary talents:

When all the pretty blossoms are gone it starts to give off fragrance.
Called 'King of Flowers,'
Its purity is unrivalled in the whole world;
Its scent [too] ranks first in the Jiangnan region.

The Jiangnan region is the area south of the Yangzi River that includes Suzhou and Hangzhou, two cities already well established as cultural centres by the Qing period. The dedication which appears on the landscape side of the bottle reads:

For the pure appreciation of Songquan, the honourable fourth elder brother. [Presented by] Xiqing.

As we have noted under Treasury 4, no. 465 and elsewhere, Zhou Leyuan was a commercial artist. He painted for a living, accepting commissions. It is to his eternal credit that his art never reflects the whims of the marketplace other than in the occasional inscription which demonstrates that a bottle was made to order. Here we have a bottle commissioned by Xiqing to present to Songquan as a gift, and wherever we see dedications on Zhou's bottles, we may assume that the name inscribed was either that of the patron, or quite often, the name of the person to whom the patron wished to give the bottle.
Zhou's mastery of the medium, and the subject of the auspicious objects, is demonstrated quite clearly in this early work. The rock is a formal powerhouse, confidently claiming the foreground of the composition and dominating it completely with its convoluted form and exquisite shading and brushwork. The landscape scene
is also one of his finest early landscapes, with all of the poetic mood we expect of these early masterpieces. The peaks towering above the two scholars, who sit conversing in a gorge beneath blossoming trees, are as moody and powerful as any in the medium and, again, the brushwork is sublime.

We talk of brushwork in inside-painted bottles despite the absence of a brush. All early inside-painted bottles were apparently done with bamboo pens, sharply bent at their point to allow access to the interior surface. The pens probably varied, since a study of the brushwork exhibits everything from a rounded, straightforward line which could have been made by the point of a sharpened bamboo stick, to the occasional stroke with 'flying white' in it. This is the white space left in brushwork when the brush moves so fast, or is twisted sharply, or begins to dry out, or is otherwise manipulated so that parts of the brush are not in touch with the paper and leave white gaps in the black markings. Easily achieved with a brush, it could only have been achieved with a pen if the end of the pen were frayed into its individual fibres, which is quite possible with bamboo. Although hard and woody in appearance, it is in fact a fibrous grassy plant. There are some Japanese fly-whisks (and whisks for the Tea-Ceremony) where handle, binding and hairs are all made up from a single piece of bamboo, the hairs being formed by splitting the bamboo into its component fibres without breaking them. It would be possible to split the end of a tiny pen similarly so that one had a brushy effect, and this must be what Zhou Leyuan and others did to achieve some of their markings. Even a cursory examination of the wonderfully fluent calligraphy of Zhou's earlier works suggests that somehow the pen was made to act like a brush, for the modulation in the strokes and the energy miraculously equate to brushwork on paper. It is also evident in the painting of the rock, where close examination reveals lines with 'flying white' and places where a single movement of the pen quite obviously divides into more than one streak of ink.


暗香生古鼎，紅葉豔秋山

玻璃、墨、水色；平唇、斂凸底、凸形圈足；一面內畫二人坐談秋山間景致，上題行書"松泉四兄大人清賞，弟錫卿"，另一面內畫一群吉物（奇石、梅、菖蒲等），上題 "殘紅落盡始吐芳，佳名喚作百花王。爭清天下無雙品，獨占江南第一香。甲申冬月書，周樂元仿古"

內畫：周樂元，藕香書軒，宣南房舍，北京，1884年11 月
高：7.49 厘米
口經/唇經：0.57/1.62厘米
蓋：珊瑚，染海象牙座
狀態敘述：壺：唇呈傾斜，或因修補缺口，唇緣有微乎其微的缺口；內畫： 除些不重要的鼻煙污斑、匙擦痕外，極善的狀態

來源：
沈乃璋教授（1966年以前）
Gerd Lester (1986)
文獻：
Kleiner 1987, 編號264
《國際中國鼻煙壺協會的學術期刊》Journal of the International Chinese Snuff Bottle Society, 1988年春期，封面
Arts of Asia, 1990年9 月～10月，頁84、85，圖21
Treasury 4, 編號467
展覽﹕
Sydney L. Moss Ltd, 倫敦, 1987年10 月
Creditanstalt, 維也納, 1993年5月～6月
佳士得，倫敦，1999年

說明：
周樂元內書的七絕是皮日休詠牡丹一首詩，與通行的文本有不一致之處，而這是唐詩常規的情況，查看皮日休詩集和收本詩的總集所有的版本之前，我們不能武斷是周樂元臆改的。詩下妙處橫生的奇石如同反面富有詩意的山水圖一樣，遠觀其勢，近觀其質，都達到了氣韻生動的境地。那時的畫具仍然限於竹筆，毫毛筆據說是後來的魯派發明的（參閱拍賣品號50關於內畫用筆的論述）。而本壺還可以講"筆法"的優美，因為周樂元能用竹勾筆造出毛筆的筆勢。仔細地觀察奇石的細節，似乎呈現和一筆畫中留拖絲或留白的現象，大概是磨破了竹簽的外皮或尖頭，竹筆還可以模擬毛筆的效果。