Hopefully a Han Sword Guard.

Apologies,it should read Sword Chape.

Nobody wants to hear the bad news…especially if it is true; what did you hear on "The Jadebase" which upset you so much?

I have often dealt with Sotheby's and Christies and Bonhams in London. Unfortunately, provenance attributions are usually hearsay.

The connoiseur collector must ultimately rely upon his artistic instincts rather than the word of auction houses and other sales venues. You needn't travel to London for expert opinions. You can easily email images to London auction houses. And they will save you the travel expense.

Just Fred

Hi Fred,

I didn't hear anything on Jadebase,I've never posted on it,just read their archives after joining.

The pieces were collected by Mrs Cheng Lammers in the 1960's and 70's so the last 15 year bit of your post can at least be ruled out.

The provenance is solid but that doesn't mean the piece is genuine,I know.

I'm afraid the staffers at Sothebys and the other places almost always err on the side of caution so a hands on inspection is the best bet.

Rarely does a piece's e-mailed image reach Stephen Loake or other senior staff.

I've had some nice Yixing and Porcelain knocked back when sending images and generally find that method unsatisfactory for both parties.

Rest assured I am cautious in my acquisitions.

Regards,

Vic

Attached is a picture of a jade piece that was bought in the late 1930. I was told that it's a Chinese. Jade tiger pendent. Han dynasty.206 BC-220 AD.52.05mm-34.20mm-19.35mm. I would love to hear your opinion.
Thank you & all the best
yankee

Forgive me for such a dumb question, but the lines look as if the material were carved away from them - that they're not just grooves in the surface.
As if the grooves were carved to delineate the design, and then material surrounding them ground away.
That would take a hell of a lot of work and patience, would it not?
Or maybe it's just the shadows in the photo misleading me...[LATER: Yes.]

Plus, it's obviously a tiger, and not some vague arty rendition of a Shang beast or dragon, which makes it more "real" - the artist actually knew what a tiger looks like?

A piece of modern cloisonne exhibiting beast patterns.

If I had six grand I'd buy it in a millisecond - the workmanship is nearly perfect, and it's engaging to look at.

eBay item 131370374705

Again, please excuse the ignorant question, but some of the lines look as if they were inscribed with a semi-circular tool - the middles of the lines look humped.

Or am I just having a hard time distinguishing the shadows of hills and valleys this morning?

If you haven't already done so buy a copy of Chinese Jade: From the Neolithic to the Qing by Jessica Rawson. She focuses mainly on the early stuff and catalogues the subject as much by function as dynastically i.e. congs, bis, funereal, belt hooks, sword fittings etc. Not expensive and lots of excellent photos and drawings. Good luck!

Hi,

I'm not sure if the above replies relate to my piece or the other Bead.

Regarding books,Laufer seems to be the best I've seen on the subject but I have a few others by Hansford and Keerne.

Here is a sword guard,possibly Han.Specific gravity 2.91

http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/42785

Apologies,Taotie Mask correct way up.

Hi everyone, and welcome Vic,

I'm supposed to be in a rush because I'm leaving this weekend for Christmas and New Year in Thailand and Cambodia, but I can't resist the call of jade.

First of all, none of Vic's pieces looks like recent production to me. Provenance is important, I think, and often helps me to make up my mind, partly because it's usefully reassuring to learn from earlier collectors' expertise (and from their mistakes), but also for a kind of sentimental connection with someone else's passion. Actually, I knew the Lammers, Frank and Cheng, back in the 70s and they, and especially she, were important figures in the collecting scenes in Singapore, Hong Kong and Indonesia. She was one of the first people to study Southeast Asian ceramics seriously and wrote several books about them; I learned quite a bit from her and after her death bought several pieces from her collection. They weren't famous for their jade, but I don't think they would have been likely to own anything that was obviously a recent fake, and quite independently, I don't see any sign of that here.

However, it's important to remember that just a short time ago - the 60s and 70s - even the most knowledgeable people had a lot of misinformation and misunderstanding about jade production in particular. I just pulled out a book I bought in 1972 by Lefebvre d'Argencé about the Avery Brundage Collection of Chinese Jades in the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco. It seemed so authoritative then, and it's clearly so full of mistakes, especially about dates, today. Such examples should stand as a warning.

Duly warned, I'll stick my neck out and say that I'm not convinced that any of Vic's pieces is undoubtedly ancient. Let me post a couple of examples of scabbard chapes (they were decorations for scabbards, not swords), one from the Met, which seems to be Han to me though it's described in the catalogue as Eastern Zhou to Han, and the other a century or so earlier that's in the Ashmolean. I've been lucky enough to hold both of them, skin to stone, at different times - a rare experience in today's museums. The carving differs considerably, but in both of them the pattern is much more assured, less hesitant than in Vic's. And then, with the vigorous chilong dragon, there's something wrong, I think, about the carving of the head, the body is overdone, and the blackened surface looks as though it's been deliberately burnt - which was done all the time by late Ming Dynasty antiquities dealers who catered to a taste for ancient artefacts among the nouveau riche. Just like today.

My own hunch is that these pieces may date from that time, though there's another faint possibility that they could have been made as late as the 1920s or 30s when there was quite a big demand for ancient jades among foreigners in North China. I don't know much about the characteristics of that production, but there are lots, I'm told, in the storerooms of western museums.

I hope I'm wrong about this, Vic. Likewise with your pendant, Yankee, but sorry, I'm as close to 100% certain that it's like no Han pendant and no Han tiger I've ever seen.

Well, I've put off my packing long enough. A happy new year to all.

Cheers,

Will

It's all about the stone. I think one should collect jade for its beauty not its age. Two examples - one, a close-up of the corner of a Zhou dynasty cong; the other of eighteenth century cats - nearly three millennia apart but they give me the same pleasure.

W

PS. I meant to say, Chris, you're dead right about the carving; that's what's so wonderful about some of the best jades from the Zhou dynasty on (and even, less commonly, in the Shang); almost the whole surface had to be carved away in order to accentuate the design so that it looks and feels as though it's raised up rather than incised.

Is this book worth getting?

Here's the Friends of Jade review:

(Teng Shu-p’ing, Ed.) Taipei: National Palace Museum, 1995. 247 + (2) pp + 4 pp foldout, 91 jades illus in multiple color plates, add’l color and b/w illus. English and Chinese text. Cloth, gilt and silvered, gold endpapers, color illus d.j. and slipcase. 12 x 8 3/4 inches. $125.

With the new prosperity of Asian economies and the growth of international auction activity, important jades are now gravitating toward collections in Taiwan and Hong Kong. Taiwan’s National Palace Museum, as part of its 70th anniversary celebration, staged an exhibit of the finest archaic jades from five private Taiwanese collections. This lavishly produced book catalogs four of the collections— jades not widely published before. More than half the pieces are from the Yang-te-t’ang collection, published previously in a more modest volume (Ancient Jades from the Yangde Tang Collection, $15). Jades from the Lantien Shanfang collection appear in a separate, even more luxurious catalog.

In three brisk pages, the Introduction reaches back 7500 years to the dawn of China’s recognition of nephrite as a special stone. Its use in weapons, ritual objects, ornaments, and funerary items is briefly recounted. There are some unusual statements, asserting for example that in the early days “Shamans, religious figures with exclusive rights to lead worship, were also the sole masters of jade-cutting techniques ... ” Indeed, the relationship between jade and shamans is stressed throughout the text.

Seven brief sections— each two pages or less— describe the artistic motifs and principal characteristics of the jades of each period covered, from Early Hongshan to Eastern Han. The sources of material, the mineralogy and colors, the carving techniques, and the alterations characteristic of each period are briefly touched upon. A milestone in jade carving came with the use of iron cutting tools during the Warring States, leading to the finely worked examples from that period. By then, native sources of nephrite had become depleted and raw material had to be brought from the distant K’un-lun mountains. This led to the concept of valuing true jade (chen-yu, nephrite) over simulants (min).

Ninety-one jades are then illustrated in color plates, mostly multiple-view. These museum quality pieces range from beads up to a full jade burial suit. The photography is superb, with some impressive close-up detail shots where one can almost feel the tool marks and alteration in the stone. A computer-enhanced picture of one piece brings out the subtle surface carving, the latest high-tech solution to the problem of photographing jade. The excellent photography is diminished, however, by the somewhat peculiar layout. Pieces are typically presented on opposing pages, photo on the right page and caption on the left (the minimal captions, unfortunately, offer little information about the pieces). Pictures are often much smaller than the page would allow, or turned to not take best advantage of the page dimensions (for example, plate 14). Sometimes a small closeup shot or rubbing shares the left page, but often that page is empty or has only a small, useless repeat of the main photo. The net result is a substantial amount of empty white space on both pages. The Chinese preference is to leave white space “for the bird to fly,” but in this case a more efficient layout could have made this book at least 60 pages shorter and therefore more affordable. The book concludes with a stylistic chart and chronology foldout comparing the forms and surface decoration of each period.

The text has a number of minor typos, repeats, and other editing errors surprising in such a lavish book. For the advanced collector or student of jade seeking previously unpublished pieces, this book is a worthwhile addition. However, those just beginning a jade library may want to consider some other books first.

Eric J. Hoffman
(Published in Friends of Jade Newsletter, August 1996)

Hi everyone, and welcome Vic,

I'm supposed to be in a rush because I'm leaving this weekend for Christmas and New Year in Thailand and Cambodia, but I can't resist the call of jade.

First of all, none of Vic's pieces looks like recent production to me. Provenance is important, I think, and often helps me to make up my mind, partly because it's usefully reassuring to learn from earlier collectors' expertise (and from their mistakes), but also for a kind of sentimental connection with someone else's passion. Actually, I knew the Lammers, Frank and Cheng, back in the 70s and they, and especially she, were important figures in the collecting scenes in Singapore, Hong Kong and Indonesia. She was one of the first people to study Southeast Asian ceramics seriously and wrote several books about them; I learned quite a bit from her and after her death bought several pieces from her collection. They weren't famous for their jade, but I don't think they would have been likely to own anything that was obviously a recent fake, and quite independently, I don't see any sign of that here.

However, it's important to remember that just a short time ago - the 60s and 70s - even the most knowledgeable people had a lot of misinformation and misunderstanding about jade production in particular. I just pulled out a book I bought in 1972 by Lefebvre d'Argencé about the Avery Brundage Collection of Chinese Jades in the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco. It seemed so authoritative then, and it's clearly so full of mistakes, especially about dates, today. Such examples should stand as a warning.

Duly warned, I'll stick my neck out and say that I'm not convinced that any of Vic's pieces is undoubtedly ancient. Let me post a couple of examples of scabbard chapes (they were decorations for scabbards, not swords), one from the Met, which seems to be Han to me though it's described in the catalogue as Eastern Zhou to Han, and the other a century or so earlier that's in the Ashmolean. I've been lucky enough to hold both of them, skin to stone, at different times - a rare experience in today's museums. The carving differs considerably, but in both of them the pattern is much more assured, less hesitant than in Vic's. And then, with the vigorous chilong dragon, there's something wrong, I think, about the carving of the head, the body is overdone, and the blackened surface looks as though it's been deliberately burnt - which was done all the time by late Ming Dynasty antiquities dealers who catered to a taste for ancient artefacts among the nouveau riche. Just like today.

My own hunch is that these pieces may date from that time, though there's another faint possibility that they could have been made as late as the 1920s or 30s when there was quite a big demand for ancient jades among foreigners in North China. I don't know much about the characteristics of that production, but there are lots, I'm told, in the storerooms of western museums.

I hope I'm wrong about this, Vic. Likewise with your pendant, Yankee, but sorry, I'm as close to 100% certain that it's like no Han pendant and no Han tiger I've ever seen.

Well, I've put off my packing long enough. A happy new year to all.

Cheers,

Will

It's all because of the stone. I think one should collect jade for its beauty, not because it's this or that age. Two examples, nearly three thousand years apart - a close-up of the corner of a Zhou dynasty cong, and two eighteenth century celadon jade and russet cats. They give me the same pleasure.

W

First of all,thank you for your responses,it is appreciated.

Will,I feel envious that you knew the Lammers family,Mrs Lammers seems to have been a trailblazer and her collection of all things both pottery,porcelain and Jades were impressive.

I would say that she was not bothered about simply collecting high end pieces,just genuine pieces (at least of pottery and porcelain)and that is why I have a positive feeling about the small part of her collection that I purchased.

Unfortunately her own personal inventory for the Jade/Nephrite/Serpentine pieces was not found among the family papers,so we do not know where and from whom she purchased them from or what she purchased them as.

I'll keep you informed of any updates which will not be until the New Year.

Enjoy your travels and have a great Christmas.

Vic

I'll try them again

http://www.asianart.com/articles/hoffman/

http://www.friendsofjade.org/current-article/2006/3/12/liangzhu-jade-the-real-mccoy.html

Generally I collect Jade that is easy to understand so I like simple broken and reworked pieces are good for learning. Here is an example what I believe to be a "leftover" center cut from from a larger Bi shape, where the cutting lines are subtle enough to look natural and unintentional. This piece is D: 2.4cm and 9mm thick.

other angles

Here is another piece,an absolute beauty of a Bi.

Beatiful coloured Nephrite.

Spot the difference. Spring and Autumn Period Jade repaired sword guard. This piece was broken and refitted with another piece of jade and recarved, as best as I can express it- I would say the new carving lacks confidence.