Boating with Wang Hui

Ma Shaoxuan, Studio for Listening to the Qin, Ox Street district, Beijing, 1906
Height: 6.53 cm
Mouth/lip: 0.66/1.82 cm
Stopper: aquamarine

Provenance:
Bonham’s, London, 13 May 2010, lot 46a

 

Colourless crystal suffused with icy flaws; with a slightly concave lip and recessed flat, elongated-oval foot surrounded by a protruding flattened, elongated-oval foot rim; painted inside on one main side with a waterside landscape with a foreground river, one hilly bank with various trees, including a willow, around a fenced country residence with various pavilions, the river flowing under a small bridge into a larger body of water on which a scholar sits in a skiff, with a far bank of hills, inscribed above in regular script Fang Shigu laoren’ bifa 仿石谷老人筆法 (Following the brush-style of Old Shigu’), followed by one seal of the, Shao , and on the other in regular script with a poem by Wang Wan王灣, preceded by the date Bingwu zhongchun丙午仲春 (Mid-spring of the bingwu year) and followed by the signature Ma Shaoxuan馬少宣, and one seal of the artist, Shaoxuan.

Alexander Whittaker