Lot 1113. A rare pair of huanghuali and spotted bamboo scholar’s cabinets, yuanjiaogui, 17th century. Estimate USD 2,800,000 - USD 3,200,000. Photo Christie's Image Ltd 2016.
Each huanghuali-framed cabinet has a huanghuali single-panel top within a protruding frame with round corners raised on slightly splayed legs of rounded square section. The sides and doors, which open from the removable center stile to reveal three shelves and a dark red lacquered interior, have beadedhuanghuali frames that enclose panels composed of vertical strips of spotted bamboo (xiang fei zhu) overlaid at mid body by two huanghuali cross members, all above plain aprons and spandrels at the front and back. The back is covered with a thin coating of black lacquer. 44 ½ in. (113 cm.) high, 26 ¾ in. (68 cm.) wide, 14 ½ in. (37 cm.) deep
Provenance: Cabinet 1: Ho Cheng, Hong Kong, 1996.
MD Flacks Ltd., New York, 1996.
Eskenazi Ltd, London, 1997.
Ronald Longsdorf, 1998.
Cabinet 2: Hannah Chiang, Hong Kong, 1997.
Literature: Marcus Flacks, Classical Chinese Furniture: A Personal Point of View, London, 2011, pp. 142-51.
Zhang Jinhua, Classical Chinese Furniture from Weiyang, 2016.
Notes: The round-corner tapered cabinet, yuanjiaogui, with its simple lines, is one of the most beautiful and elegant designs in classical Chinese furniture. It was a popular and successful form, its type of construction widely used in cabinet making throughout the Ming and Qing dynasties. In the present rare cabinets this simple but elegant form has been elevated not only by the refined molding of the huanghuali members and the carefully balanced proportions, but especially by the use of strips of spotted bamboo which form the panels of the doors and sides. Each cabinet is constructed with 114 of these strips, each uniquely figured with natural spots of varying patterns and colors which play against each other to create a fascinating visual interplay of light and dark. This combination of a simple, well-known shape and two highly prized materials, huanghuali and the finest spotted bamboo, exemplify the scholarly ideal of classical Chinese furniture of late Ming date. As such, these seemingly unique cabinets appear to be a very early example of the combining of mixed materials, a design choice for the construction of furniture and furnishings which became fashionable during the Qianlong period. Representative of this later fashion is a small 18thcentury scholar’s cabinet (78 cm. high) of yuanjiaogui shape illustrated by MD Flacks Ltd in Classical Chinese Furniture IV, New York, Spring 2001, pp. 24-27, no. 11. Made to be placed on a kang or table, this cabinet also combines huanghuali and spotted bamboo, but here the bamboo has been cut into small pieces rather than strips and applied to the softwood panels of the sides and doors to create an elaborate, dense design of hexagons on the sides and interlocking angular scrolls on the doors, both patterns within borders of angular key fret.
The dark red lacquer on the interior of each cabinet is over a clay and textile base, which was the proper application of lacquer during the Ming dynasty. Cabinet 2 also had decorated paper applied over the interior lacquer at some stage, possibly during the 18th or 19th century.
Christie's. The Flacks Family Collection: A Very Personal Selection, 16 September 2016, New York, Rockefeller Plaza