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Bao Tiancheng of the rhinoceros horn cup in the Forbidden City
Wuxian (now Suzhou, Jiangsu) is a famous sculptor in Jiangsu in the late Ming Dynasty. He can carve exquisite cups, boxes, fan pendants, hairpins and seals with rhinoceros horn, ivory, various hardwoods and spices. His design is ingenious and exquisite, and he is as famous as Lu Zigang, a famous jade sculptor in Suzhou. Among the works handed down from generation to generation, there is a rhinoceros horn plantain leaf pattern pot, which is his masterpiece with beautiful shape, exquisite appearance and bright color. This small thermos is 13cm in height and 15x7.8cm in diameter. It is a flowing thermos pot made of two Asian rhinoceros horns. The small rhinoceros horn is the pot cover and the big rhinoceros horn is the pot body. The lid of the pot looks like a helmet and has a dark color. Carved palindrome buttons are embedded in the back, and Yang Wen's banana leaf pattern is engraved around the cover. On the left side of the pot body is the light element spout. A tiger crawls around the pot body and stares at the spout. On the right is the handle, around which three dragons play up and down. From bottom to top, the four layers of patterns on the pot body are flat, the second layer is animal face, and the third and fourth layers are flat. The carving technique is flexible, the pot body pattern and knife method are shallow and hidden, but the pattern is clear and smooth, similar to Tian Huangshi's carving. In the place where the small pot handle was carved, the author used rich imagination to carve the one-horned dragon flexibly and vividly, which is a rare treasure of rhinoceros horn art in the late Ming and early Qing dynasties. This work was donated to the Palace Museum by Mr. Ye Yi on 1985.