Lot 141: A GOLD AND SILVER-INLAID ‘FIGHTING BEARS’ BRONZE MAT WEIGHT, WARRING STATES TO HAN DYNASTY

So this is lot 141. It's a map weight from the Warring States period and it's showing fighting bears, which is a known subject quite a few times in the last 20, 30 years on the market. We have selected two examples for direct comparison. One that sold for roughly 60,000 euros in the past and another that made almost 90,000 euros. And it's not only a popular subject on map weights, but it's also a subject that followed the depiction of the single bear. Of course, a single bear on a map weight is a static depiction. We can just show literally a sitting bear. There is one example that sold for over 200,000 euros because it had very good inlay work, such as the present piece. But this is arguably the best ones, the best group of bears that has this quality of inlay work in gold and silver. And the reason why group of bear is much more interesting in my personal opinion is because it shows a movement. We see here one bear attacking the other and we can see from the scene this happened just now. We see that his claws here and here, they are getting a hold of the other bear and we can see that his ears here are tucked as they normally are when the animal is in a lurking position. Whereas the other one here has his tongue out and the ears are still open and wide as he was caught in surprise and he's yelling in pain. But then we see his huge claws here and here, already the fangs out. We also see, interestingly, how well the eyes are denoted here and how nicely the swing of the legs is created. And we see also the articulated spine, which is additionally inlaid in silver. So this is a piece that is literally of the quality of a Japanese netsuke carved in ivory, but made over 1,000 or 1,500 years before the Edo period in Japan. So it's really a very early and very important piece if you look at it from that perspective. It's very heavy. Yeah, you can see it's really a massive piece, over half a kilo. So it clearly served and conceived as a mat weight. And I think bottom line on this, it's coming from a noted collection in the Pacific Northwest of the United States of America. And it's one of the very, very few pieces that appeared on the market in the last 10 years that have this quality of inlay. We know, for example, if we want to really see the quality, we compare with Christian Dadier in Paris, who has published a group of larger pieces, of wildcats, I think tigers, that have the same level of quality inlay work. They are much bigger, but we know, of course, that to create a small and compact piece like this with this kind of movement, you need to create the bigger one first and then condense them. So yeah, I think at the price of 10 to 20,000 euros, low to high estimate, this would be an amazing catch. And we hope it will find a good and nice new home soon.