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A SUPERB AND IMPORTANT LARGE JADE TIGER PENDANT LATE SHANG DYNASTY, ANYANG, 13TH-11TH CENTURY BC
纽约 北京时间
2021年09月23日 开拍 / 2021年09月21日 截止委托
拍品描述
A SUPERB AND IMPORTANT LARGE JADE TIGER PENDANT
LATE SHANG DYNASTY, ANYANG, 13TH-11TH CENTURY BC
The flat, curved pendant is in the shape of a crouching tiger and carved on each side in a double lines delineating a large eye, an ear, and markings on the body and the curled tail. The yellowish-green jade has some dark brown areas and opaque buff alteration. Together with a toned gelatin silver print of C. F. Yau, circa 1940, signed ‘Iraida/NY’ in red ink.
4 9/16 in. (11.6 cm.) long (maximum, ear to tail), cloth box
Tonying & Company, Inc., New York, prior to 1939. C. F. Yau (Yau Chang Foo, 1884-1963) Collection, New York. Dorothy Yau (Sze Zoh Yao, b. 1913) Collection, New York, acquired from the above, 10 November 1946. By descent to George Tsoo-Ying Young (1935-2002), New York.Lot Essay AN IMPORTANT JADE TIGER PENDANT FROM THE SHANG DYNASTY By Robert D. Mowry Exceptionally rare and exquisitely carved, this beautiful Shang-dynasty jade tiger pendant is important for many reasons: at 11.6 cm in length (maximum, ear to tail), it is one of the largest such pendants known;1 its imagery is powerful, and its condition is excellent; exhibited and published in New York as early as 1939, it has a distinguished provenance that can be traced from 1939 to the present; and, as it hasn’t been publicly shown or exhibited since 1939, it is fresh to the world’s eyes. Most important of all, however, it compares in style and quality to a jade tiger pendant excavated in 1976 from the tomb of Lady Fu Hao (d. c. 1200 BC) , a principal wife of Shang-dynasty King Wu Ding (r. c. 1250–c. 1192 BC), attesting not only to the importance of this piece but to the high status of the person for whom it was made; in fact, it might have been made for Shang royalty. In short, it ranks among the most important Shang jade tiger pendants to come to market in many decades. A flat pendant embellished on both sides, this exceptional object would have been suspended by means of a cord, probably of silk, that was secured via the circular opening at the top the tiger’s head. It likely hung from the wearer’s belt, perhaps alone but possibly linked together with beads and other pendants. The tiger, called hu or laohu in Chinese, is among the most recognizable of the world’s charismatic megafauna. Originating in China and northern Central Asia, the tiger was known to the earliest Chinese, who likely feared, admired, and respected it for its strength, ferocity, and regal bearing. Though its precise symbolism in Shang times (c. 1600–c. 1046 BC) remains unknown, the tiger doubtless played a totemic, tutelary, or talismanic role. By the Western Han period (206 BC–AD 9)—a thousand years after this pendant was made—the tiger was regarded as the “king of the hundred beasts”, or baishou zhi wang, due its power and ferocity and especially to the markings on its forehead which typically resemble the character wang , or “king”. In addition, not only did the tiger figure among the twelve animals of the Chinese zodiac, but it gained a place among the auspicious animals that symbolize the four cardinal directions—the white tiger, or baihu, of the west, the azure dragon of the east, the vermillion bird of the south, and the black tortoise of the north. Each side of this flat jade pendant is embellished with identical imagery that shows the tiger crouching and set to pounce; its large head lowered, its mouth open, its fangs bared, its sizable forequarters tensed, its tail curled, this tiger exemplifies power, virility, and ferocity. Its pose is virtually identical to that of the tiger featured on the celebrated Shang-dynasty stone chime 2 excavated in 1950 from a tomb at Anyang, Henan province, the last Shang capital, and now in the collection of the National Museum of China, Beijing. (Fig. 1) This tiger also relates closely in presentation to that on Shang-dynasty engraved bones recovered at Anyang and now in the collection of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Philadelphia (65-2-1A3 and 65-2-34). It also shows remarkable kinship to the tigers engraved on the convex face of a bone spatula excavated from Tomb M1001 at Xibeigang, Anyang, Henan province.5 This pendant relates most closely to the tiger pendant measuring 13.3 centimeters long excavated at Anyang in 1976 from the tomb of Lady Fu Hao (d. c. 1200 BC).6 (Fig. 2) The crouching posture, the massive head and forequarters, the open mouth, the bared fangs, the stubby paws, and the curled tail with chevron stripes are all notably similar, as are the stylized surface markings that enliven the animal’s body, though the shape and arrangement of those markings varies from piece to piece. Both the present pendant and that of Lady Fu Hao sport a T-shaped appendage atop the head, as does the tiger on the Shang stone chime. The suspension hole in both the present pendant and the stone chime was drilled through the T-shaped appendage but in the Fu Hao pendant it was drilled through the tiger’s face, immediately in front of the eye. Apart from the color of the jade—the present pendant is a rich, warm brown, the Fu Hao pendant is white—the main difference between the two pendants is the basic shape: the present example claims an overall triangular shape with the tiger portrayed in a crouching position, its head and forequarters slightly raised, while the Fu Hao pendant, like an inverted jade huang, has an arced shape, the tiger’s body curved upward with its head and tail higher than its belly. A principal wife of Shang-dynasty King Wu Ding (r. c. 1250–c. 1192 BC), Lady Fu Hao was a powerful figure who gave birth to a royal prince and served as a military leader, apparently leading troops into battle.7 That jade objects of this type were buried in her tomb—along with some 2,000 other luxury items—attests to the importance of such pieces as well as to their elite associations. Presumably made during Lady Fu Hao’s lifetime or shortly thereafter, the objects recovered from her tomb must date to around 1200 BC, the approximate year of her death. The kinship of the present pendant to that from Lady Fu Hao’s tomb not only attests to its Shang-dynasty origins but points to a date of manufacture in the Shang period, probably between the late thirteenth and the mid-late eleventh century BC. Characterized in Chinese as chenzixingyan, or eyes in the shape of the character chen, the tiger’s eyes on both the present pendant and that from Lady Fu Hao’s tomb are large and similarly shaped, with a large, circular iris and a distinctive, downward-pointing hook at the front. They share those same eyes with the tiger on the stone chime, with the jade tiger-form jue recovered from the tomb of Lady Fu Hao8, with the jade owl-form pendant also from Lady Fu Hao’s tomb—also called a “jade bird-form knife”9—with the jade tiger-form jue excavated in 1954 and now in the Tianjin Museum,10 and with the small Shang jade sculpture of an elephant excavated in 1935-36 from Tomb M1567 at Xibeigang, Anyang and now in the Academic Sinica, Taipei (no. R001579).11 In fact, large, downward-hooked eyes are a characteristic feature of Shang pictorial art and typically appear in the animal faces on contemporaneous bronze ritual vessels.

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拍品估价:300,000 - 500,000 美元 起拍价格:300,000 美元  买家佣金:
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600,000 - 6,000,000 20.00% + VAT
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