CHINE, DYNASTIE QING, MARQUE HORIZONTALE À QUATRE CARACTÈRES EN ROUGE DE FER ET ÉPOQUE JIAQING (1796-1820)

The present bottle is part of a well-known group of bottles, made for the Court, usually in sets of ten or twenty, to supply the enormous and constant supply of bottles required for the Imperial family and for distribution as gifts. See snuff bottles of similar shape but different design in Snuff bottles in the Collection of the National Palace Museum, Taipei, 1991, n° 90, p. 126. See a similar snuff bottle with the exact same design illustrated in Heavenly creations, Chinese Snuff Bottles from the Collections of Anthony Cheung, Humphrey Hui, Po-ming Kwong, Tuyet Nguet and Christopher Sin, University Museum and Art Gallery, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, 2005, n° 161, p. 107. Compare with an almost identical snuff bottle preserved in the Seattle Art Museum (inv. no. 98.49.156).C.