A large and important ‘zitan’ painting desk, Qing dynasty, Qianlong / Jiaqing period

拍品描述

Property from an Important American Private Collection (7) Height 31⅜ in., 79.7 cm; width 69⅜ in., 176.2 cm; depth 31⅞ in., 81 cm Grandiose in scale and lavish in its use of the finest quality zitan timber, the present painting desk is a masterly example of Qing-dynasty furniture making; fit in function for a scholar or painter of the highest order, its extravagance in material luxury suitable for a prince or emperor. Historically, zitan was primarily grown in southern India and southeast Asia, with a very small quantity known from the southern provinces of present-day Guangxi, Guangdong and Jiangxi in China. The precious timber was appreciated for its jade-like silky texture, fine and dense grain, and deep luster and became the favored material of the Qing court. Records show that during the reign of the Qianlong Emperor (r. 1735-1796), for example, the Palace Workshop used over 290,000 kilograms of zitan, most of which had to be imported from overseas. Nearly decimated by the early nineteenth century due to its long growth period, limited availability and high demand primarily from the Imperial court, zitan is a truly rare material and, as such, its use has become synonymous with opulence. As evidenced by the extant examples of furniture from the Palace Collection in Beijing, a very high proportion of the furniture made during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was constructed from zitan. The natural limits of the material itself meant that many of the remaining tables are quite narrow in proportion, although a few larger examples do exist. The solution to creating tables of deeper proportion was to use multiple planks in the top panel; the present work, for example, has four tightly joined planks of zitan timber. The importance of a table’s depth was not simply one of aesthetic choice or luxuriousness: the dimensions of handscrolls and other forms of calligraphy and painting required certain dimensions to allow for a work to be viewed properly. Indeed, the esteemed furniture connoisseur and scholar Wang Shixiang stated in his seminal Connoisseurship of Chinese Furniture, vol. I, Hong Kong, 1990, p. 68 that painting tables must be at least 76 cm in depth to be labeled as such, otherwise they would not be able to accommodate the paper or silk for writing or painting. Other examples of large zitan tables of similar dimension in the Palace Museum include a painting table with lingzhi motif aprons, another with a banana-leaf design carved to the waist, and a third inscribed and gilt-decorated with poems by Zhang Zhao (1691-1745), a court official and calligrapher of the Qing court, illustrated in The Complete Collection of Treasures of the Palace Museum – Furniture of the Ming and Qing Dynasty, vol. II, Hong Kong, 2002, PP 113-115, pls 100-102. Compare, also, with a zitan waistless painting table of similar dimensions but in a more classically Ming style in the collection of the Shanghai Museum, illustrated by Quincy Chuang (ed.) in The Chuang Family Bequest of Fine Ming and Qing Furniture in the Shanghai Museum, Hong Kong, 1998, p. 79, cat. no. 30. The overall design of the present table, however, can be best compared to a smaller zitan table in the Palace Museum, illustrated in The Complete Collection of Treasures of the Palace Museum – Furniture of the Ming and Qing Dynasty, vol. II, Hong Kong, 2002, p. 128, pl. 113, which displays similar archaic scroll to the aprons, closely related joinery of the legs, including rounded corners at the top frame, and similar scalloped ‘chucks’ or ‘shoes’ at the bottom of the feet. The present work is distinguished by the inclusion of six concealed drawers, their fronts deeply carved with an archaic scroll motif that is carried across the aprons; such drawers would have been useful repositories for the accoutrement of a scholar. At this time, only one other painting desk in zitan is known from the Palace Collection: a large, bamboo-form eight-drawer desk of slightly larger dimensions, carved with inscriptions from some of the most important painters and calligraphers of the Qing dynasty, illustrated in The Complete Collection of Treasures of the Palace Museum – Furniture of the Ming and Qing Dynasty, vol. II, Hong Kong, 2002, PP 140-141, pl. 125. The incorporation of the inscriptions by those important artists indicate that it would have been used for the appreciation of important classical paintings, as was likely the case with the present desk. An almost identical painting table to the present example was offered at China Guardian Beijing, 12-16th November 2011, lot 114, and a very closely related table with base stretchers and four drawers, was sold at Christie’s New York, 25th-26th March 2010, lot 1228. Both the China Guardian and Christie’s examples display the same archaic scroll motif across the aprons and the clever integration of the hidden drawers, and all three works must have been produced by the same workshop, perhaps even as a single suite of furniture. The Christie’s example was reputedly acquired in Guangdong, circa 1890-1920s, similar context to when General Xiang Hanping might have acquired the present work. Compare, also, to a later carved zitan corner-leg table with imperial provenance sold at Christie's New York, 14th October 2020, lot 9 for $1,530,000. General Xiang Hanping (1890-1978), originally from what is today Pubei county in Guangxi province, was both an important military figure during the Republic period as well as a renowned calligrapher, painter and collector of Chinese paintings and works of art. As a general with the Kuomintang during the Second Sino-Japanese war (1937-1945), he fought in many notable battles, including the Battle of Shanghai and the Battle of Xuzhou. In 1934, Xiang Hanping briefly resigned his military command and returned to his hometown in Pubei, Guangxi, embarking on the construction of an ornate mansion that combined traditional concepts of Chinese architecture with modern Western construction techniques and material. It was during this time that he also began to collect Chinese paintings in earnest, reportedly offering to pay a thousand taels of silver to purchase a calligraphy scroll by Chen Baisha (1428-1500). After his retirement from the military in 1946, Xiang Hanping served in the National Assembly as the representative for Guangdong province before moving to Hong Kong in 1949, where he lived the life of a scholar and intellectual until his death in 1978. His works of calligraphy have been offered both at Christie’s and Sotheby’s and exhibited at the Hong Kong Museum of Art. Of his collection, an important handscroll, Happiness through Chan Practice: Portrait of Wang Shizhen by Yu Zhiding (1647-1716), stamped with his seal in 1934, was later sold at Christie’s New York, 25th March 2010, lot 848 for $3,442,500, while other works from his collection, including by Huang Shen (1687-1772) now reside in the Museum Rietberg in Zurich.

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