Miniature carving in turquoise matrix with a flat base and an abundance of irregularly shaped holes, to imitate a scholar’s rock, for placing on a table. The material has been carefully chosen to contrast the fine web of black lines, the embedded remnant of the ‘host’ rock, with the brilliant colour of the turquoise.
Provenance:
Private collection, France, acquired in Paris between the 1970s and the early 1990s.
Exhibited:
London, 2019, Eskenazi Limited.
Published:
Sotheby’s, Hong Kong, A Private Collection of Scholarly and Imperial Works of Art, 4 April 2012, number 3002.
Eskenazi Limited, Room for study: fifty scholars’ objects, London 2019, number 7.
Similar examples:
Robert D. Mowry, Worlds within Worlds, The Richard Rosenblum Collection of Chinese Scholars’ Rocks, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1997, numbers 75 and 76, for two small turquoise stones fashioned as miniature scholars’ rocks.