Snuff Bottle

Portuguese traders most likely introduced snuff to the Manchu court in the late seventeenth century, and for most of the eighteenth century the taking of snuff was primarily a courtly pleasure. In the nineteenth century it spread throughout China, and the container for the snuff, which the Chinese preferred in a bottle form with a small ivory spoon inside, became a common object that was eventually collected widely. The Chinese used snuff bottles of every imaginable description and carved them out of all types of materials. Of the many types of bottles the Chinese created, none seems more intriguing than those that were inside-painted on glass. In this technique the painting is done with a tiny brush inserted through the small opening at the neck, with the artist manipulating the brush from the bottom up while painting the subject in reverse. The subject matter of inside-painted bottles was varied and included ambitious landscape paintings as well as small-scale themes of birds and flowers. In this late nineteenth-century bottle, the artist has turned to a subject popular since the Song Dynasty and has lovingly portrayed several cats crouched together in a garden corner. (From “A Handbook of the Collection: Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art,” 1998)