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PROPERTY OF AN ENGLISH LADY
Lot 36
A fine Large russet and green Jade 'Luohan in a grotto' boulder 18th Century
15 March 2021, 10:00 EDT
New YorkSold for US$40,312.50 inc. premium
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A fine Large russet and green Jade 'Luohan in a grotto' boulder
18th Century
Carved from one end of a much larger boulder of nephrite jade and covered almost entirely with a dark brown skin thinning in color to reveal the olive-green stone beneath, particularly in the carved areas, the stone of vertical oblong profile with one corner edge deeply cut with a small mountain niche centered by the robed and seated, bearded and moustached, louhan Bodhidharma, with eyes closed in meditation, his head covered by a cowl, a waterfall cut from a natural fissure in the stone runs nearby and continues under the grotto where he sits, the surrounding craggy rock faces are variously carved in low and high relief with knotty branches with hanging vines and wutong and pine dispersed to the reverse side.
7in (17.7cm) high
Carved from one end of a much larger boulder of nephrite jade and covered almost entirely with a dark brown skin thinning in color to reveal the olive-green stone beneath, particularly in the carved areas, the stone of vertical oblong profile with one corner edge deeply cut with a small mountain niche centered by the robed and seated, bearded and moustached, louhan Bodhidharma, with eyes closed in meditation, his head covered by a cowl, a waterfall cut from a natural fissure in the stone runs nearby and continues under the grotto where he sits, the surrounding craggy rock faces are variously carved in low and high relief with knotty branches with hanging vines and wutong and pine dispersed to the reverse side.
7in (17.7cm) high
Footnotes
十八世紀 青玉帶皮羅漢山子
The Metropolitan Museum of New York has a taller though more slender boulder carving, cut from a very similar dark-toned green and brown nephrite as ours. The luohan is identified as, possibly Gopaka, as he holds a feathered fan. He is seated in a grotto carved deeply from the stone and like our example has foreshortening of the ground plain by the use of a steep rock shelf upon which he meditates. The rockwork is similarly carved with wutong or maple, see www.metmuseum.org / Jades / accession number:21.175.145. The jade entered the collection in 1921 from the famed Edmund C. Converse Bequest. The museum suggests a likely date of production in the latter part of the 18th century sometime after 1757. This was when the Qianlong emperor visited the Shengyin Monastery in Hangzhou and saw a set of sixteen luohan paintings attributed to Guanxiu (832–912), a monk-artist renowned for his eccentric depictions of Buddhist adepts. The emperor fell in love with the paintings and commissioned responses in various media, including jade carvings. Woodblock prints, like the eighteenth century catalogue, Guyu tupu depicting similar themes may also have been used as a reference for the jade carvers.
A comparable boulder from the National Palace Museum, Taipei, dated to the Qianlong period and depicting Bodhidharma gazing into a grotto wall in meditation and inscribed with an Imperial poem by the Qianlong emperor, is illustrated in The Refined Taste of the Emperor:Special Exhibition of Archaic and Pictorial Jades of the Ch'ing Court, Taipei, 1997, pl. 39.
An 8 inch high boulder carving of Bodhidharma seated in a grotto, of similar color but of very different scale to ours, with the central figure of the luohan taking up about half the height of the carving, was offered at Sotheby's from the Collection of Stephen Junkunc III, 22 September 2020, lot 213. A very slightly smaller pale green jade example was sold at Bonhams, London, 7 November 2013, lot 115. For a smaller pale celadon and russet jade boulder of the sixth luohan Bodhidharma in a grotto, see Sotheby's, 23 September 2020, lot 653.
A slightly later boulder of a similar dark stone but with less attention to the quality of the carving and its disposition was sold at Christie's, New York, Lacquer, Jade, Bronze, Ink: The Irving Collection, Part II, 21 March 2019, lot 1119.
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