Cathy,
My pleasure. You need to understand something - in 1976 I visited the late Isadore Lample in Santa Monica CA, and he had an octagonal SB in ruby red glass, 18th C. Palace Workshops, very like yours, but no mark. I did not like it, feeling it looked European. Which is no surprise, since the shape was copying European pocket watches received as tribute from Europeans to the Qianlong Emperor. He'd bought it from Hugh Moss.
I did not buy one till 1981, when I bought #1 from YF Yang, and #2 and #3 as well; all 18th C. and all Palace Workshops (I got some great glass from YF in 1981!
). But only the Purple one had a mark. I saw possibly 50 octagonal bottles before 1990, and if 10-15% had incised marks, it was a lot.
In Sept./Oct. 1980, the late Marian Mayer of Cape Cod Mass., exhibited her glass SBs at Steuben Glass on 5th Ave. in NYC. She had 20 with incised Imperial marks, all genuine, out of the 130 displayed (she had about 250 glass SBs in total, most gifted to the Corning Museum, Corning, NY after her death in 1988). She had four octagonal among the 20.
I asked her how she'd found 4 octagonal bottles with marks (2 Qianlong, one Jiaqing, and one Tongzhi; the two octagonal blue ones with Daoguang marks I bought from Bob Hall in 1989, but which had also come from her collection, Hugh Moss found for her after 1980). She was not that friendly to me, but opined that, "They are as rare as hens' teeth, but perseverance will win the day." That was true till the early 1990s, when 2 HK collectors 'demanded' marked octagonal
bottles; and got lots of them. Whether the bottles are genuine and the marks not, or whether both bottles and marks are modern, I won't say; but I will say three more things:
1. In 1996, there was a booth in the dealers' room (all PRC 'dealers' actually, mainly modern Inside Painters - none of the Western dealers had been able to negotiate the complex PRC laws) at the Beijing part of our Beijing/Hong Kong convention, selling octagonal bottles - the colours were 'right' ( correct shades of ruby red, Imperial yellow, purple, etc.), the finish was 'right', etc., for from US$50 - US$350 each, and from 20 mm to 65 mm in height. They must have had 60-80 octagonal bottles on display as well as other shapes - they had an Imperial yellow basket weave for US$350 that I still regret not buying! It was so good, that if it had come up later in the Bloch collection I could have been fooled! I am serious.
2. Clare Chu in her home, in Feb.2014, had a line of 7 modern octagonal bottles of assorted sizes stood on a display, all bought by her in Shanghai Curio Market for US$20-50 each.
3. I honestly believe your bottle is 'right', though I can't tell about the mark's authenticity.
Dear Rube,
Thank you. I ended up buying 17 of the IPSBs from White Wings, though, sadly, none of the superb Ding Erzhongs.
Best,
Joey