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| 88 A fine jade boulder 18th century Height: 9 1/2 in, 24 cm worked in the round and in very high relief as a craggy mountain with a scholar and his servant standing on a ledge to observe the waterfalls and to listen to their sounds; the servant carries a large bundle. A flight of steps is cut into the steep face of the rock and two waterfalls flow down, one falling in the grotto behind the figures and emerging from the base of the rock; two large, gnarled pine trees are worked in relief, one with its twisted roots visible. The stone is a greyish celadon-green tone, with some russet markings and grey speckling, mainly to the base where a section of the outer stone is retained (see right). |
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In Sacred Mountains in Chinese Art, Munakata illustrates a jade boulder from the Avery Brundage Collection, Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, no. 88, pp. 170-1, with a very similar composition and notes that the iconographical elements, the waterfall, the pine and the cave, all symbolise immortality. A boulder from the British Museum is illustrated in Rawson, Chinese Jade from the Neolithic to the Qing, fig. 96, p. 99, and she comments that “the boulders and carvings of mountains in jade are in effect different means of capturing paintings in three dimensions” (p. 97). See also Chang, The Refined Taste of the Emperor: Special Exhibition of Archaic and Pictorial Jades of the Ch’ing Court, no. 40, pp. 142-3. |
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