Noble Steed
Bottle: 1770-1880
Engraving: Yiqin guan zhuren, 1825-1880
Height: 6.85 cm
Mouth/lip: 0.75/1.90 cm
Stopper: coral carved with a coiled chi dragon, pearl finial; jadeite collar
Provenance:
Zhu Miao Collection
By descent to Zhu Miao’s son
Poly Auction, Beijing, 27 April 2013, lot 401
Translucent honey-grey and variegated brown agate; with a concave lip and recessed flat, oval foot surrounded by a protruding. flat, oval foot rim; carved with a cameo scene on one main side of a horse standing beneath a pine tree with one foreleg raised, the other engraved in running script with an encomium related to the subject, followed by the signature 銕琴館主人 Yiqin guan zhuren (‘Master of the Iron Zither Lodge’).
The inscription reads
馬俊而瘦. 松高而秀. 萬里之材, 千年之壽.
As a horse of outstanding qualities is tough and lean
And a pine when tall is fine and fair,
So the former has the ability to run a myriad li,
And the latter the longevity to live a thousand years.
The character 鐵 (tie) is written here with an early variant 銕, but the meaning remains the same.
There are a great many people in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries who had the courtesy name or sobriquet Iron Zither or some permutation of Iron Zither (such as ‘Iron Zither Man of the Way’). Many of them were artists, and many of them lived in or were natives of Yangzhou, Changshu, Suzhou, and other Jiangnan cities.
