λ TWO RARE CHINESE NODDING HEAD FIGURES OF MANCHU OFFICIALS

18TH/EARLY 19TH CENTURY

Their heads and hands carved in ivory, their robes and hats of woven silk, one with a rank badge enclosing a golden pheasant for a second rank civil official, each stands with his hands held slightly before him, their eyes, mouths, moustaches and beards detailed in black, each with his long hair in a plaited queue, the figures stand on later gilt and black lacquer rectangular plinths, 58cm. (2)

Cf. W R Sargent, The Copeland Collection: Chinese and Japanese Ceramic Figures, pp.192-195, no.93 for a similar pair of seated Manchu nobles with ivory heads and hands in The Peabody Essex Museum of Salem, Massachusetts; see also Christie's London, 23rd November 2006, lot 94 for a related plaster nodding head figure of a lady wearing embroidered silk robes.

Such figures may have developed from the tradition of three-dimensional ancestral figures which originated in Hunan and Fujian, probably as an extension of ancestor paintings. Ancestral figures were first produced before the 1st century AD, and the tradition continued in Fujian into the Qing dynasty. However, as with the pair in The Peabody Essex Museum, the stylisation of these figures suggests that they are more likely to have been created for the export market rather than as functional ancestral images, and so they are probably more related to the many unfired clay nodding head figures exported to the West in the 18th and 19th centuries.