All,
As many of you know I have a fascination of concentric ring based snuff bottles. This type of base usage is often confined to porcelain dragon pillar bottles. In all the years of collecting I have only seen 1 or 2 other bottles with a concentric ring base that did not have a dragon design. This year I encountered three such bottles of which I was able to purchase two.
Here is a recent acquisition that I went out on a limb to purchase and paid an $850 US dollar hammer price to get. The bottle was at one of the lesser auction houses and I had to make my assessment off photo’s alone, which can be risky. First appearances of auction photos indicated that the bottle was hard paste with a nicely detailed underglaze blue and white design; see bottle below. From the photos the bottle appeared good, but I did not notice the “restoration” work around the top rim of the bottle.
Once the bottle arrived I found that there was an auction number label on the bottle with scotch tape over it. When I went to peel off the label and tape, part of the bottle’s painted surface lifted off with the label.
Oh my god!!! It appeared that the bottle had been dropped or struck hard resulting in impact fractures to the hard paste surface. Now what do I do? Can I return the bottle based on a cover up of its condition? My heart sunk as I thought about the money wasted, over $1000 dollars when you included the auction house bid premium and shipping cost. What an expensive mistake! Do I attempt to send it back or do I see how extensive the damage is by peeling off of restoration work? Surely the bottle must be cracked all the way through the body.
I then inspected the interior of the bottle to see how extensive the damage and/or repair was. Hmmm, the interior was glazed throughout and looked just fine. There were no cracks or evidence of a repair. A bit puzzling, and then the light went on in my head.
Could this be a soft paste porcelain bottle? The only way to find out would be to peel off the painted surface and clear-coat to see how much area was covered by this material.
I proceeded to lift the clear-coat surface with the blade of my pocket knife at the point where the label was attached and continued peeling it off from around the bottle as if it were an orange rind. As it turned out the entire bottle was clear-coated and where there were crackles in the glaze it was painted over with matching colors so as to hide said cracks. Someone went to great effort to hide the cracks on a soft paste porcelain bottle.
Shaking my head and not understanding why! Why would someone do this? Did they think it needed restoration or did they simply wish to cover up the natural cracking condition in the glaze? What a mess!
Anyway, all ends well. Underneath this cover-up was a beautiful underglaze blue design that had great detail and a wonderful use of various cobalt blue tones. The only blemish is a smoke like color in the glaze on a quarter of the bottle’s upper rim, which I presume was a firing issue. Not enough to detract from the bottle’s elegance. Also impressive was how crisp the painting became once the film was peeled away.
Here is a similar type of cover-up on a plate. What are they thinking in doing this! Anyway live and learn, Charll
