Inside Painted Snuff Bottles


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Inside-painted rock crystal snuff bottle by Ye Zhongsan with the twelve zodiac animals. Seen here are a horse, a monkey, a snake, a tiger, a rabbit, and a pig, 1932.

Inside-painted glass snuff bottle by Chen Zhongsan with eighteen monkeys in a landscape setting, 1918. Rachelle R. Holden Collection.

Glass, ink and water-colours; painted on the inside with a continuous subject of various auspicious objects (a natural rock-sculpture, a basket of fish and peonies, a cabbage and two turnips, a planter of calamus grass etc.

Glass and ink; painted on the inside with an admonition to espouse hard work in regular script followed by the signature Yupu, with the same repeated in Manchu script, including the signature, on the other main side.

Crystal, ink and water-colours; painted on the inside on one main side with a mountainous, river-landscape scene in which a scholar strolls towards his country retreat followed by his attendant, the narrow sides inscribed with a poetic couplet

Colourless crystal, ink and vermillion water-colour; painted on the inside on one main side with a portrait-bust of a young Chinese man with a moustache, in a three-piece Western suit, with a butterfly collar and tie.

Flawless crystal, ink and watercolours; painted inside with a continuous garden scene in which one kitten watches a katydid on a turnip beneath the title in seal-script Shangle (‘Appreciate and enjoy’), followed by the signature Wang Xisan.

Colourless glass, ink and water-colours; painted on the inside on one main side with a cockerel, standing on one leg on a grassy, perforated, rocky bank looking backwards, with flowering peonies, by Zhou Leyuan

Transparent brown crystal, ink, and water-colours; painted inside with a continuous snowy landscape scene in which, on one main side a Manchu equestrian hunter, shooting a goose out of the sky, by Ye Zhongsan