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All auctions / Asian Art / Mammoth Ivory Carving | Street Musician Playing Huqin with Dog, Signed Tadamori
East Asia, China. A barefoot street musician bends over his huqin, bow arm poised, the snakeskin-covered cylindrical resonator braced against his thigh and the two-peg spiked neck rising past his shoulder. Carved from mammoth ivory with confident naturalism, the figure wears a short jacket fastened by frog closures, its folds and stitched seams incised with fine tool work, his hair drawn into a topknot above a lined, absorbed face. He perches on a slatted bench beside a small double-gourd bottle, while a lean dog stretches out at his feet, ears pricked to the music. A signature seal reading Tadamori is inlaid into the surface of the sectioned burlwood stand, which supports the composition on a gnarled root base. A genre subject of the modern Chinese ivory-carving workshops, prized for anecdotal warmth rather than ritual function. The huqin family of bowed spike fiddles, of which the erhu and the higher-pitched jinghu are the best known members, arrived in China from Central Asian neighbors and took its classic form under the Song and Yuan. The instrument is unmistakable: a slender neck pierced by two lateral tuning pegs, no fingerboard, a small resonator traditionally faced with python skin, and a horsehair bow permanently threaded between the two strings so that the player pushes and draws it against either course. Itinerant performers carried such fiddles through markets and teahouses, and the jinghu in particular became the lead voice of Peking opera, shadowing the singer's line note for note. Post-ban ivory carving in China turned largely to legally traded mammoth tusk recovered from Siberian permafrost, a material that accepts the same fine chisel and polish as elephant ivory while carrying distinctive interior crazing and warm ochre staining from its long burial. Workshop output of the late 20th and early 21st century favored exactly this kind of narrative genre group: laborers, fishermen, sages, and musicians rendered with a caricaturist's eye for the sitter's absorption in his task. Item # 205059
Estimate:$2,500
To the auctionView all items fromArtemis Fine ArtsorAsian Art
Estimate:
$2,500
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