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Art
& Culture Feng
Shui with Horoscope Almanac Mind, Body & Soul Style |
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The Art of Snuff Bottles Whether this story is truth or fiction, interior painting in snuff bottles was born and developed in China and is unique to the country.
The art became perfected and flourished toward the end of the Qing Dynasty at the turn of the century. Curio dealers began to offer good prices to collect them. Snuff bottles are small, generally no more than 6-7 centimeters high and 4-5 centimeters wide, yet the accomplished artist can produce, on the limited space of the internal surfaces, any subject running the whole gamut of traditional Chinese painting - human portraits, landscapes, flowers and birds and calligraphy. It is said that each artist puts a his or her soul inside one single bottle!
- by Frank Jang, Asian art and furniture historian and importer Shopping! View items from AsianConnections Collection!
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A popular story
tells how the art of painting snuff bottles originated. In the Qing
Dynasty, an official stopped on his way to a small temple for a
rest. When he took out his crystal snuff bottle to take a sniff,
he found it was already empty. He then scraped off a little powder
that had stuck on the interior wall of the bottle by means of a
slender bamboo stick, thus leaving lines on the inside, visible
through he transparent wall. A young monk saw him at this and hit
upon the idea of making pictures inside the bottle. Thus, a new
art form was born.
The
"painting brush" of the snuff bottle artist today is not
very different from what the official in the story used at the beginning.
It is a slender bamboo stick, not much thicker but much longer than
a match. The tip is shaped like a fine-pointed hook. Dipped in colored
ink and thrust inside the bottle, the hooked tip is used to paint
on the interior surfaces of the walls, following the will of the
painter.
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