December 14, The Crow Collection of Asian Art will open its first loan exhibition featuring antique Chinese snuff bottles. The works of art from the Spinnaker Collection, a private collection of exceptionally rare quality and condition, will be on view through April 15, 2007.

The Spinnaker Collection of Chinese Snuff Bottles provides intriguing insight into the extraordinary lengths to which the Imperial workshops of Qing Dynasty China (1644-1912) sought to impress the Emperors, aristocrats and literati.

After snuff was introduced into China by the Portuguese at the beginning of the Qing Dynasty, the habit of taking snuff became fashionable at court amongst the rich and well connected.  The small containers, with their slender spoons used to carry and dispense the precious powdered tobacco, became fashionable and sought after. The bottles were made from seemingly ephemeral natural sources such as gourd, coconut, and wood, as well as highly prized and precious materials such as bronze, ivory, jade, porcelain and enamelled glass and copper.  The addictive habit of taking snuff spread from the north to the south of China, and became a serious social problem until the turn of the 19th century when its popularity waned.

The formation of the Spinnaker Collection began in 1968 when the first two bottles were purchased from a hotel shop in the lobby of the Intercontinental Hotel in Beirut, for $50.  The collection grew with further purchases in Hong Kong. The acquisition of a book by Lilla S. Perry, The Adventures & Studies of a Collector, published in 1960, led to an introduction to the Chinese Snuff Bottle Society in Los Angeles, which is today, a worldwide group, linked by a shared love of this rare art form.

The Spinnaker exhibition includes a small and important selection of examples from the collection of Chinese Snuff Bottles on short term loan to The Crow Collection of Asian Art. In particular, there are a wonderful group of jade bottles, many of them from the fabled and coveted Suzhou School, which ingeniously exploited the natural markings and inclusions in jade to decorative perfection. There is also a very rare, enamelled, white glass bottle painted with a cricket on each side; two stunning Imperial Yellow glass bottles - a delicious color that was reserved exclusively for the Emperor’s personal use; and some superb colored glass overlay bottles of dynamic design.

This wonderful nucleus of snuff bottles has been carefully chosen to compliment that of the Crow collection of snuff bottles in order to add rare and exciting examples, the moulded porcelain figurative bottles, for instance, to the museum’s display thus providing a scintillating show which will educate as well as stimulate the senses of visitors to the museum. Within this group are some of the best quality and more interesting examples to be seen anywhere, and as such, the joint show should be taken as one for educative purposes.

Also to be noted are two translucent glass bottles, painted on the inside by the celebrated artist, Ding Erhzhong with a tiny brush made from fine hairs. Ding carried the banner as the most innovative and technically skilled of all the so- called inside-painted artists.  His strokes are deft and confident and on close inspection it is difficult to believe that he was able to achieve painting on the inside surface of the bottle through the tiny neck.  Inside-painted bottles were a unique marker of the history of snuff-taking in China. Since snuff-taking had ceased to be fashionable by the 19th Century, the bottles had become highly prized and desirable for their own sake. The Spinnaker Collection at The Crow Collection of Asian Art is a unique opportunity to explore the extraordinary world of Qing Dynasty China, and to marvel at the skills and artistry of this extraordinary period in Chinese history.

The Spinnaker exhibition of Chinese Snuff Bottles represents approximately forty of the finest snuff bottles in a collection of more than 100.  The Spinnaker exhibition will be the first of several Chinese Snuff Bottle exhibitions at The Crow Collection of Asian Art, each exhibition showcasing the most superb bottles from multiple collections across
 the United States.

Robert Hall
Guest Curator