Bottle ID: 00688

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BI RONGJIU, FIGURES & MOUNTAINOUS LANDSCAPE

Date: 1895-1913

Height: 64 mm

Glass, ink and watercolors, of rectangular flattened form with rounded shoulders, painted on the inside with on one side, two figures crossing a bridge towards a pavilion on the banks of a river in a rocky mountainous landscape; beneath an inscription: 'Emulating the personal style of the Recluse of Xinluo. Made by Rongjiu'; the reverse with buildings nestled in a mountainous landscape with massive rocks in the distance.

 

Similar Examples:

Silver, Joseph Baruch.  Worlds in a Bottle:  Chinese Inside Painted Snuff Bottles and Traditional Painting, The Joseph Baruch Silver Collections, 1998,  p. 78, no. B-2.

Provenance:

Asian Art Studio
A private Los Angeles Collection
Purchased in Beijing in 1946 by the father of the subsequent owner

Exhibited:

Annual Convention ICSBS Toronto, October 2007

Bi Rongjiu's working period was from 1895 until 1913.  While he is not well known as an inside painted artist, he was the founder of the Shandong School which stills exists today.  Bi signed his bottles either Bi Rongjiu or Rongjiu, or more rarely Xinting, his art name.  He often painted landscapes in the style of the Orthodox School of painting, though not usually on both sides of the bottle, as is the case with the Crane example.  Despite being located in Shandong, he seemed to have been inspired by Zhou Leyuan with the Crane example being possibly the nearest to Zhou's work.

Urban legends abound about the birth of the Shandong School, but it seems to have begun in the following way.  Towards the end of the nineteenth century, a glass-maker by the name of Wang Zi, in Boshan in Shandong Province, was supplying glass blanks to Beijing for the inside painted artists there.  This would have included Zhou Leyuan, Ye Zhongsan and Ma Shaoxuan.  Wang got to know the Beijing artists well and was able to pass on the technique of inside painting to his friend, Bi Rongjiu, who soon began to paint bottles commercially.  Bi Rongjiu also taught his first son, Bi Baosan.  Other artists of the Shandong School who were taught by Bi Rongjiu included Zhang Wentang (died 1967), and his son Zhang Dunrui (also known as Xuecun), and Zhao Yuting (died 1961).  The two Zhang's were the artists who revived the school after 1949, and who taught today's leader of this School, Li Kechang.

In this bottle Bi Rongjiu copies the style of Hua Yan (1682-1756). Hua Yan was one of the Eight Eccentrics of Yangzhou who used the hao Xinluo shanren - the Recluse of Xinluo. He was a figure painter, landscapist, a painter of flowers and birds, plants and insects, wild animals and a noted running script calligrapher.

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