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I recently inherited a small collection of snuff bottles. I have no experience or knowledge regarding snuff bottles; furthermore I can't read or understand any of the symbols or words that appear on some of the bottles. I want to learn more about my inherited collection. I've included photos of 3 of my bottles with this message. I've been told that the bottle that looks gray with short black lines in the glass is more than 100 years old and the black lines are actually tiny pieces of hair.
I have a total of 15 snuff bottles, and if anyone would like pictures of the other items, I'd be happy to make them available. I hope someone out there can help me with some accurate information. D

If you want to learn about snuff bottles, there are a couple of thing you can do:

!) Buy a book. We have "Chinese Snuff Bottles; The adventures and Studies of a Collector" by Lilla S. Perry (among other books). This is a good book for the basics. Amazon is a good place to look for books. You can buy this book for $11.49 there.

2) Use the Search feature to search this forum with the key words "snuff bottle". This will yield many discussions on snuff bottles.

Looking at your snuff bottles with the little information you provided:

1) It is hard to tell what the material is for this item. Is it wood? In any case, if it is one piece, then it is not useful as a snuff bottle. You wouldn't want that mess hanging from your obi. Likely, it is an okimono (an object to be put on a shelf and admired).

2) The picture is too poor to tell the quality of the carving or what is carved on the bottle. It is a carved stone bottle, but what the stone is is hard to tell.

3) This is a carved, well hollowed, stone bottle. The black lines are needles of rutile. The needles are rather sparse, but whether that is good or bad depends on taste.

Typically, carved stone bottles with unremarkable carving bring in the low $100s, say $100 to $200 or a little more. Jade bottles bring more.

100 years old is fairly new. The high point of snuff bottle art was the Qianlong period (1735-96) when the emperor was a collector and had his artisans create spectacular bottles.

See the link below for a discussion of some of our snuff bottles.

Cheers,
Stan

URL Title :Snuff Bottles

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