Literary Treasures
Ma Shaoxuan, Studio for Listening to the Qin, Ox Street district, Beijing, 1895-1905
Height: 6.65 cm
Mouth/lip: 0.56/2.03 cm
Stopper: aquamarine
Provenance:
Eric Young
Sotheby's London, 13 October 1987, lot 148
Published:
JICSBS, 29/4 (Winter 1997), front cover
Ma Zengshan 1997, fig. 86
Hugh Moss and Stuart Sargent, The Water, Pine and Stone Retreat Collection of Snuff Bottles. Part Two, Non-Imperial Influence over the Snuff Bottle Arts.
Exhibited:
Taipei Gallery, New York, Chinese Snuff Bottles, 1-29 October 1993, p. 9
Colourless crystal with some minor icy flaws, ink, and watercolours; with a flat lip and recessed flat, oval foot surrounded by a protruding convex, oval foot rim; painted inside on one main side with a group of documents in three registers, the top one a folding-fan painting with two fan-tailed goldfish amidst aquatic plants, inscribed in regular script Yisi dongri Sima Zhong乙巳冬日司馬鍾 (Sima Zhong on a winter’s day of the yisi year) with a token seal of the artist, the middle register with a rubbing of two lines of four characters each and a circular fan-painting of a bird on a branch signed Bada shanren八大山人, with one token seal of the artist on the left, and in the third register, a Tang couplet in the hand of a nineteenth-century calligrapher and a rubbing from a famous Tang stele, the other main side inscribed in regular script with an excerpt consisting of the beginning of Wang Xizhi’s 王羲之Lanting Preface, preceded by a dedication 輔臣四兄大人正 Fuchen sixiong daren zheng (‘For the correction of respected, fourth elder brother Fuchen’), and followed by the signature 馬少宣Ma Shaoxuan, with one seal of the artist少宣
