Footnotes

• Provenance: a Greek private collection, Athens, formed in the 1950s/60s and thence by descent.
  
  Archaic-bronze-inspired jade jue vessels of the Qianlong period are extremely rare. Only one other example, a pair of nearly identical form but with a six-character Qianlong fangu mark, now in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, appears to have been published. The 'Fitzwilliam' pair of white jade jue vessels was given by Sir Percival David to his close friend, Oscar Raphael, the principal benefactor of the Fitzwilliam Museum's jade collection, and was later bequeathed to the museum in 1941. See J.C.S.Lin, The Immortal Stone: Chinese Jades from the Neolithic Period to the Twentieth Century, The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, 2009, Catalogue no.79, where the author notes that the Museum's pair is the best example in the Museum's collection of jade vessels inspired by archaic bronzes.
  
  The Qianlong Emperor advocated restoration of the ancient ways and suggested jade craftsmen should turn to antiquity for models. This was not simply a return to previous aesthetics but a view of ancient culture as being imbued with intrinsic qualities of sincerity, simplicity and happy exuberance; see L.Chang, The Refined Taste of the Emperor: Special Exhibition of Archaic and Pictorial Jades of the Ch'ing Court, National Palace Museum, Taipei, 1997, pp.49-50.
  
  We would like to thank Dr Lin, Fitzwilliam Museum, for permitting us to compare the jue vessels and for providing provenance information about the 'Fitzwilliam' pair of jade jue vessels.