Message #49757

[Joey Silver / Si Zhouyi 義周司]

Dear Arne,
 
     It is Ivory, NOT Bone - if you look at the mouth and the shoulders, you should see the 'cross-hatching' that proves Ivory. Bone has one direction of grain; Ivory, two; Where they cross, there is 'cross-hatching'.

     While your photography is really bad, I can identify the 'cross-hatching' (or at least, think I can. ).

    It is from  ca. 1950-1976 and either from the PRC (after 1949), or from Kyoto, Japan (1953-1976). There were workshops doing both polychrome painted carved Ivory and this type of incised and inked Ivory snuff bottles in Kyoto. The renewal of traditional Chinese handicrafts started a few years before the Hundred Flowers Campaign in 1956.

    When the USA started boycotting products from the PRC in the early 1950s, a US buyer who had been importing 'Oriental' Arts & Crafts from China and Japan, got his Japanese suppliers to produce snuff bottles of this type, to replace his Chinese suppliers who he could not buy from.

    If it has a poem (I must admit I didn't look carefully at the bottle, except to check the grain directions), and someone can translate it, and it's a couplet or poem by Mao Zedong, there is a good chance it is Chinese, and from ca. 1966-1976.

Best,
Joey