Six panel folding screen with scenes of birds, flowers, and landscapes

A traditional way to divide interior space, this standing screen features rectangular jade boards inset in six panels painted with lacquer and golden patterns. Auspicious flowers and birds of different seasons, in addition to various landscape scenes, are decorated on two sides of the five registers of jade slabs, along with ornamental details painted on the borders and apron of each panel frame. Gold and jade were luxurious materials, and their use indicates that this lavish screen was made for social elites in the Republic period.

According to Gump’s, a San Francisco company with a long history of dealing in Chinese jades, a number of Siberian spinach (dark green) jade boulders were confiscated by the Bolshevik government and sold to the Chinese for much-needed cash. The boulders appeared in the Beijing market in 1921, and Gump’s buyers in China immediately purchased some of them and had them cut up into screens and incense burners for the Western market. This screen came not from Gump’s but most likely from a rival Beijing firm whose objects were crafted from spinach-colored jades in that same cache.