Chinese Hand-Painted Marble Screen with Literary Couplets

A Chinese inscribed and Hand-Painted marble inset six panel screen, late 18th/early 19th century, the hardwood frame set into a later curved stand. The marble panels delicately painted with court figures in landscapes surrounded by a lengthy calligraphic inscription. Each of the screen's six panels is decorated with a fourteen-character Chinese couplet, the first couplet being repeated, perhaps for literary effect, on the fifth panel. Taken together, the couplets appear to tell the tale of an unknown yet worthy and persevering scholar, who finally attains the ultimate success in the Imperial examinations on the last (or leftmost) panel. The couplets are finely, composed and draw on literary allusion, which adds to their rhetorical beauty. A, transcription and translation of the second couplet (the couplet that appears second from right) is given below as an illustrative example. 'The moon impartial has forever shone the same clear white, the flower heedless of renown gives forth a perfume fine.', note that the naturalistic veil of this couplet's second line harbours the sense of, 'a certain person who is oblivious to fame and prestige [presumably the, persevering scholar mentioned above] is possessed of virtue that bears no, relation to his or her station'. This sense is a product of the established, analogisation in Literary Chinese of virtuous people to perfumed flowers, and, the secondary sense of 'beyond one's station' that is carried by the expression, translated as 'fine'. Note too that while the translation largely preserves the, original's metre and sense, it could not preserve its word-to-word antithesis, which is characteristic of Chinese couplets, and heightens the parallel formed, between the moon of the first line and the figurative flower of the second. Provenance: The contents from the Peninsula home of Sir Ian Potter and Lady Potter AC. 63.5 cm high, 81 cm wide. Provenance: Purchased by Dr Bouverie Anderson Stuart from Elwyn Yorke, Edgecliff, NSW, November 23 1954. By descent to Lady Potter.