About This Forum

This snuff bottle community forum is dedicated to the novice, more experienced, and expert collectors. Topics are intended to cover all aspects and types of bottle collecting. To include trials, tribulations, identifying, researching, and much more.

Among other things, donations help keep the forum free from Google type advertisements, and also make it possible to purchases additional photo hosting MB space.

Forum Bottle in the Spotlight

Charll shared this beautiful Xianfeng (1851-1861) dated bottle depicting NeZha combating the Dragon King amongst a rolling sea of blue and eight mythical sea creatures.


Chinese Snuff Bottle Discussion Forum 中國鼻煙壺討論論壇
March 28, 2024, 07:35:28 pm
Welcome, Guest. Please login or register.

Login with username, password and session length
 
  Home Help Search Contact Login Register  

Suzhou carved bottles?

Pages: [1] 2
  Print  
Author Topic: Suzhou carved bottles?  (Read 2112 times)
0 Members and 96 Guests are viewing this topic.
Joey Silver / Si Zhouyi 義周司
Private Boards
Hero Member
***
Gender: Male
Posts: 11283


« on: September 21, 2016, 06:55:07 am »

Dear Cathy,
 
      If you've not absorbed the information from the almost 40 books you already own, what is the use of buying another book? I can't believe I'm saying this - books to me are 'holy' - but you need to absorb the knowledge you already have at your fingertips.

     Take ONE subject (Glass, Stone, Ceramic, Organic, Inside Painted, Metal), and learn it and don't buy ANOTHER single bottle, till you know and UNDERSTAND the material. It is not enough to be able to parrot the information and seem to understand it. You need to actually understand it. Once you really 'own' the information, buy yourself one bottle in that material. Then do it with another material. Don't feel you have to do it in the order I've written, but do it.  
This way, you have less to remember at one time.

    The Jade, and the three Chalcedonies are very nice for examples made between 1980 and 2010, but they were made to sell to collectors who thought they were getting late 18th C. - mid 19th C. examples made for collector-users in Qing China.
Giovanni is correct, but he and I are 'purists' - the bottle needs to have been made for use - it is at base a utilitarian object.
That is why the ones still made today for actual use in Mongolia are valid to me (at least to give out snuff in Synagogue on Sabbath and Holy Days), but bottles NOT made for use are not.

   But you see that Charll and Tom have other views. They are right for themselves, as Giovanni and I are right for ourselves. That is why I suggested, when we first started corresponding, that you needed to define yourself as a collector.
'Pretty' (in the eyes of the viewer, obviously) objects which look like genuine Chinese snuff bottles; or genuine Chinese snuff bottles, made for use between 1640 and 1900 (although there are also a number of Ming vessels, mainly in Nephrite jade, reused as snuff bottles in Qing).

   Best,
Joey
Report Spam   Logged

Joey Silver (Si Zhouyi 義周司), collecting snuff bottles since Feb.1970

Pages: [1] 2
  Print  
 
Jump to:  

Powered by EzPortal