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Subject:Re: Oriental Dish Information Sought
Posted By: Bill H Wed, Oct 22, 2014
These items also are frequently seen identified as soap dishes, so here are my thoughts on why they aren't soap dishes or cricket boxes (or cages).
Chinese export soap dishes I've owned or encountered in the past all have come in three-pieces: a base dish, usually rectangular with low walls; a liner or soap tray, having a perforated and countersunk center with edges overlapping the base; and a knobbed cover with edges that nests in a galleried space on the liner. My attached photos show such a dish, though it’s a marriage having a base with squared-off corners, whereas those on the soap tray are rounded.
Neither this artemisia leaf piece nor others of various forms I've seen called "soap dishes" and "cricket cages" were made to accommodate a cover. Soap was made in olden days by digesting animal fats in a lye solution until a pH neutral mass formed and was evaporated into cakes and bars. However well the resulting product lathered Grandpa’s beard, Granny’s Lye Soap was eaten by household pests like cockroaches when they couldn’t find anything tastier to munch. As such, I’d sooner believe the claims that such items actually are cricket cages and not soap dishes, because they aren't made to accommodate covers to keep the bugs out.
Relevant to my thinking as well, though, is that most of these items without lids tend to come in auspicious forms like butterflies, artemesia leaves, quatrefoils (which are like two ruyi scepter heads that meet in the middle), and other portentous shapes that are more readily identifiable with metaphysical matters than the pastime of letting crickets sing you to sleep. When I think of cricket cages, I also think of light, organic materials like bamboo, bone, ivory and gourd that won’t easily break and kill or free the cricket if they fall to the floor. Most of these cages have tight-fitting caps or screw-on lids in some cases.
That said, confusion undoubtedly will persist, though the export types I own are soap dishes without doubt. I've looked at the Christie's and Sotheby's archives and find only a handful of porcelain cricket cages, none of them constructed like this or any of the other mentioned pieces I believe to be censers.
As always, I'm willing to entertain convincing arguments to the contrary.
Best regards,
Bill H.
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