Topic: Glass snuff bottles...

[keith]

Just would like to know,if possible,where in China they're from,factory etc...any other info,Keith.

[Mosquito]

Hi Keith,

You ask very difficult questions.... These snuff bottles are quite hard to pin down. The styles have been made for a number of years and makers are not well documented. The style and techniques are very much in the 'Peking Glass' vein (at least as referred to by collectors in the west), but that's not to say that these originate from the Beijing area - snuff bottles like this are available from tourist markets all over China.

The marks underneath don't help a great deal either, they appear to read 軒月古 (xuan1 yue4 gu3). Being an old-style mark, it will be intended to be read from right to left, i.e. gu yue xuan. Direct translation would be gu=ancient, yue=moon & xuan=high. The characters do appear on this site though, where it is said that it is the name taken by Hu Zue Zhou who made snuff bottles in Suzhou during the Qianlong period:
http://www.geocities.com/snuffbottle1/

Your bottles are certainly not Qianlong, however & I would guess they are no older than 1980s production at the earliest.

Steven

[keith]

Thanks for reply,I am aware of the tradition of dating pieces in respect to other earlier makers,as a collector of cloisonne and Satsuma I have seen this a lot,I suppose I was hoping someone may have been able to nail down a certain factory,thanks,Keith.

[Mosquito]

http://jygyp.en.alibaba.com/productgrouplist-200273488-1/snuff_bottle.html

One possible source, but there are literally hundreds more.... It's also sometimes hard to tell which firms actually produce these types of items & which are middlemen. I found when researching some makers of Liu-Li glass in China in 2007 different companies appeared to offer some of the same products in their catalogues - the same is true when looking at snuff bottles. Naturally people are also protective when it comes to revealing the origins of their stock, so determining whether the pieces are made in one place or another becomes very hard.

Even though your bottles look to be modern mass-produced items, they are still lovely items and are a great thing to collect in my opinion.  

Steven

Beijing Taoyunzhai Craftwork Company may be one possible source for the cameo snuff bottle; their catalogue shows quite a few bits of cameo cut Peking glass - these are the pieces that often turn up on ebay described as 18th/19th century....... still there are countless other sites offering similar wares.