materiality
snuff bottle display in thomson european gallery, ago. part of the frank gehry redesign.
ken thomson
the ago collection of snuff bottles belonged to ken thomson, following a tradition of western museums who have collections due to bequests of very rich & powerful white collectors.
known to have a connection to materials & objects, and an affinity for things that could be held in the hand, the snuff bottles were collected based on ken’s feeling, touch, and idea that he could sense when an object was ‘made for you.’* ken’s connection to materiality seems deeply grounded in his self image, and an object’s material objective quality was thus refracted through his particular lens on the world.
susan stewart on collectors: collectors foreground the material quality of an object, over historical meaning and knowledge. rather than seeking to know, they seek to collectk nowable things. collected by thomson’s sense alone, the ago snuff bottle collection in a way embodies stewart’s critique that collected objects represent “the ultimate self-referentiality & seriality of money at thesame time that it declares its independence from ‘mere’ money.”*
gourd bottle from thomson's collection. gourd bottles were rare, early ones bear kangxi marks. this one unfortunately isn't on emuseum, so only one front-facing side is visible
materials
biyanhu were not only made of all materials‘known to the chinese’ as robert hall, ken’s snuff bottle collections advisersaid; their materiality also points outward to china’s trade connections with aglobal economy outside its borders.
- nephrite jade came fromeastern turkestan (present-day xinjiang); coral from the japan sea; jadeite andamber from burma; painted enamels on gold, copper, glass (techniques learnedfrom swiss & french Jesuits; from venetian murano glass makers); ivoriesfrom southern asian and africa; amber from baltic
- some enamelled/ inside-paintedsnuff bottles also depicted european subjects: blonde women and children;sailors; dandies; pastoral scenes with country mansions. a kind of interestinginverse of orientalism
from the thomson collection: european figures, with countryside scenery
a painting of a court lady taking snuff, from 18th or 19th century manchu
who hands can hold a snuff bottle?
snuff bottles, specifically the ones deemed‘valuable’ today, are overt symbols of class, which is easy to overlook whenadmiring a beautiful object.
ken thomson was said to have liked keepingantiquities in his pockets, on his desk, a funny parallel to how the literatiof qing china would use the bottles as accessories. for the literati, this wasa means to draw the line between their own elite status and that lowly pipe tobaccosmokers, who persisted in smoking tobacco widely across china, contrary tosnuff bottle-specific histories saying the short-lived, draconian anti-tobaccolaws of the 1630s put a stop to it. published books on snuff during qing timesshowcased a belief that trueappreciation of snuff culture was for the few but never the many or theordinary. funny enough, the main audience for snuff bottle guides were the‘lower classes’ wanting to cross class divides by molding themselves in theimage of the ruling class.
interestingly, despite snuff culture’s demise,there remains a tradition of nonfunctional snuff bottles and inside-painting onglass, which appears to fuel a thriving tourism souvenir trade.
inside-painting tools used by contemporary snuff bottle painters. after watching some videos on youtube, it seems like you can now make requests
snuff bottles today: available at sotheby's; available at souvenir markets.
also available on ebay! these bottles supposedly 'vintage' 'post-1940s'