Hi Geoff, All
Yes today Geoff called to my home with his 6 x Lu Jianguang bottles
I can definitely confirm they are really hand painted.
We did the classic test which is a super close-up photo in Macro mode ( 3MB pic) of a tiny part of the bottle, then blew up the pic with my computer a couple of dozen times. This method beats the best magnifying glasses by a very long way ( 32 x power is the best magnifying glass I have : I reckon that the macro photo / computer blow-up method was approaching 150 x magnification)
Even under a good hand-carry magnifying glass ( 8 - 16 X ) it's very hard to spot a photo-fake : I know because by chance I once bought one such fake ( see the very long thread elsewhere on the Forum ) and it had me - and the dealer who sold it to me - totally fooled.
It was only Pat who alerted me to the give-away dark brown area at the base of the picture ... and then I gradually dissected the bottle , scraping away the photo-film in places.
A photo-film bottle goes fuzzy under super - high power magnification. But in a real hand painting one can distinguish the individual brush strokes - and , as Geoff rightly pointed out - the super-tiny figures on his bottles - barely a couple of mm tall - turn out to be quite
badly / crudely painted under very high magnification .
That's not to say the painting is actually
bad ... far from it ! It's a
miracle that anyone can paint tiny men on horses only 2 mm high and still fill in the detail , down to arms, legs, eyes... mustaches ! See the couple of close-ups Geoff posted below which were from the macro pics I took today
Bottom line , Geoff has a real treasure in his collection !
Also, given that he bought the bottles from CAC when Lu Jianguang was the resident artist-of-the month in the late 1990's it's
inconceivable that CAC / Lu Jianguang would have fobbed off a fake photo-print set of bottles.
Lu Jianguang is one of the most respected Ji School artists. I never met LJG in person, yet, but I do have a tiny 1 inch high snow scene LJG bottle ( see pic attached) that I bought via Mr Tai, Hop Wah Antiques, who used to run the IPB shop in the Ocean Hotel, TsimShaTsui. He had the bottle in his office when I visited him a few years ago long after he shut down his IPB shop, and he sold it to me at the original marked price of
HK$5,000 from 1997 ( ! )
Of all the bottles I have, this one has the narrowest neck of all : only 4 mm diameter. The detail is exquisite and I reckon it's now worth at least US$3,000 + , probably more
So I estimate that the bottles Geoff has, which are much bigger ( i.e. "normal" size) and painted in incredible detail are easily worth US$ 5 6 K each, and as a set of 6 they are worth at least US$50- 60,000 to a collector of discerning taste. Probably very much more .
But the best thing of all was meeting Geoff again
He's the first
real MIPB collector I've got to know in HK and it's
all due to the ForumTHANK YOU GEORGE !
Geoff and I now plan a couple of days bird spotting on the remote Po Toi Island in a month or so
Can't think of a more congenial way to spend a couple of days.
Also we plan a detailed study of every shop in Hollywood road to see if anything has changed re MIPBs since I did the same thing about 3 years ago ( at that time - zero for MIPBs : only genuine antique IPBs for sale, plus a few highly over-priced junk MIPB bottles)
Cheers
Peter
PS : I'm now about half-way through re- arranging my collection following the epic 8 - day photo- shoot and a super -clean of all my shelves ready for the ICSBS later this year. Also, for the first time, I'm digging out all the 300 + little wooden stands I mentioned before and matching them to the bottles . Great fun !
And - honestly - it looks like a a complete new collection ! Every bottle shines and gleams in the spotlights installed in the shelves.
That to me is THE beauty of IPBs - they are just SO beautiful to look at ( which is why I cannot possibly imagine locking them up in boxes for 99.9% of their lives : they deserve to be admired and marveled at 24/7 ) *
I now recall all the fun I had as a kid with my matchbox collection ( also miniatures !) , arranging and re- arranging them in little shelves in my bedroom. Guess I'm a miniature - collecting junkie !
I mean actual actual match
boxes, not the match box miniature toys.
In the old days ( 1950's) pre-lighters, every matchbox was a little work of art, and I had some boxes going back to pre - WW 2,not to mention little Spanish leather boxes . My matchbox collection is still at home, in a suitcase
BTW: for those of you who have visited my home, you may have seen my mini collection of model cars and steam engines.
The cars are 1: 18 scale made by CMC Models :
http://www.cmc-modelcars.de/en/home/- a German / Chinese JV company (the models are all made in China) . They are
incredibly detailed and the best quality / detail available commercially in the whole world (they each have over 1,500 - 2,000 individually-made parts) . And they are also super- reasonably cheap ! Typically only US$400, which is less than I pay these days for a low- grade MIPB.
But the steam engines are the creme- de- la- creme, because they are not electric : they all actually run on
real live steam, even the tiny 00 scale engines ..... now that
really is a miracle of miniature engineering !
* Ask me over a beer in the pub what the " * " refers to ....