Hard cover catalogue, 110 snuff bottles, 88 pp, full color illustrations, English and Chinese text.
Catalog available for purchase, $35 including domestic shipping, $55 international.
The catalog can also be viewed online.
A FASCINATION FOR MINIATURES:
THE LINDA F. CRAWLEY COLLECTION OF CHINESE SNUFF BOTTLES
A FASCINATION FOR MINIATURES: THE LINDA F. CRAWLEY COLLECTION OF CHINESE SNUFF BOTTLES
CATALOGUE FOREWORD
We are pleased to offer the Linda F. Crawley Collection of Fine Chinese Snuff Bottles. Linda passed away three years ago after a short and painful fight with brain cancer. She and her husband Loyd retired in Palm Beach County some twelve years before when Loyd left his position as an executive for a major multinational company. They had travelled all other the world for professional reasons and had twice lived in Europe for several years, the first time in England and the second in Brussels, Belgium. This suited them well because they both were avid collectors with a wide range of interests in art and antiques, from American and English furniture to paintings and carpets, as well as European and Chinese objects. They had in particular assembled an excellent collection of tea caddies and an unusually fine collection of Yixing tea pots. Their areas of interest have always been eclectic and they have developed a knowledge in each of their collecting fields. They continued traveling and developing their collections after Loyd's retirement.
An artist in her own right, Linda had a passion for miniature room settings that she would tirelessly assemble, going to great lengths to find the proper furniture and accessories for her interiors. A few years ago she surprised us with Asiantiques, a miniature room of 31 x 21 cm modeled after our gallery in New Orleans (see illustration.) She explained that it had taken her more than two years to get the furniture she had commissioned to a famous maker and to find each of the accessories needed for the setting.
Linda's passion for tiny objects in their most minute details explains her fascination for the Chinese snuff bottles she started collecting while living in Europe and pursued avidly after settling in Palm Beach. This pursuit was purely aesthetic, and she spent long hours selecting her bottles and displaying them in a cabinet in her study. She had two main areas of interest: glass, which constitutes almost half of the collection, and enameled bottles, whether made of porcelain, metal or glass. She considered the hard stone bottles to be a complement to the jade collection that Loyd and she had assembled and had a particular fondness for the warmth of organic materials, such as coral, amber and lacquer. The collection includes several snuff bottles purchased from Carl Schmidt, a Palm Beach resident who completed his own collection prior to 1950. (Mr. Schmidt later collected Japanese netsuke and inro and was associated with The Morikami Museum in Delray Beach, Florida.) The rock crystal snuff bottles were previously in the collection of Sam Denham, a Florida physician; these snuff bottles were exhibited in the Cummer Museum of Art in Jacksonville, Florida, in 1993.
Linda's was still a collection in the making when it was brutally interrupted. We offer these snuff bottles to the collectors in fond memory of Linda Crawley who left us too quickly and too soon.
