A RARE PAIR OF 'PRUNUS' TIANQI LACQUER STOOLS17th/18th century The distinctive top shaped as a prunus flower, one finely decorated with a pair of cranes in a lotus pond, the other with a phoenix and magpies perched amidst flowering shrubs of chrysanthemums and peonies, both incised designs on a leiwen ground and all incised with black outlines, the straight edges with continuous lotus scrolls above the recessed waist decorated with reticulated ruyi designs decorated with further lotus, the shaped apron and curving legs similarly decorated and set into the base stretchers of matching shapes. Each 50.5cm (19 5/8in) high. (2). 十七/十八世紀 填漆梅花式花鳥紋香幾一對 Provenance: Alice Boney (1901-1988), New York 來源：古董商Alice Boney（1901-1988), 紐約 Alice Boney was a renowned Chinese-art dealer based in New York City. In 1924 she married Jan Kleykamp and after their honeymoon tour of European cities they returned to New York with a large ment of Tang dynasty sculptures and opened the Jan Kleykamp Gallery, the first gallery in the city to sell Chinese art. After her divorce, she made a significant name for herself in America in the burgeoning field of Chinese art appreciation and collecting, despitepeting in a male-dominated business with C.T. Loo and C.F. Yau. Recognised as a preeminent authority on Chinese art, Boney earned the moniker 'Doyenne of Oriental Art Dealers.' Her clients included the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Freer Gallery of Art, Mrs. William H. Morris, and President Herbert Hoover. Boney moved to Japan in 1958, where she remained for the next sixteen years. She returned to New York in 1974 and continued to deal from her Park Avenue apartment until her death in 1988. Ubiquitous in Chinese painting, poetry, ornament, and in nature, the flowering plum, the inspiration for the present lot, is uncontested as China's favourite blossom. Over the centuries it has acquired a wealth of meaningful associations, not only foretelling the weeing of spring but also identified with understated elegance, the fragility and transience of female beauty, and the solitary enjoyment of nature by the noble recluse, detached from worldly pursuits. The famous Song dynasty scholar Su Dongpo (1037-1101) wrote in one poem that: 'The flowering plums' bones are of jade and snow, and their souls of ice', as the plum blossom was endowed with the Confucian virtues of resilience and perseverance for blossoming in deep winter. Stands and stools such as the present pair served a variety of purposes, as contemporaneous paintings and woodblock prints illustrate. They were usually positioned in the centre of a shrine or in a room and often supported incense burners. Incense was not just used during the performance of religious rituals as it often apanied flower appreciation and tea drinking, demonstrating the essential role incense played as part of literati aesthetics and lifestyle. Incense also purified and concentrated the mind, produc