This remarkable, crisply carved plaque represents one of the exceedingly rare jade artefacts that can be attributed to the Shijiahe Culture, a late Neolithic culture that flourished in the second half of the third millennium BC in the middle Yangzi River valley around Tianmen in Hubei province. Shijiahe plaques with these characteristic ragged outlines, their bold facial features delineated by thin raised lines, and the open mouth revealing sharp teeth, are considered to represent ancestor masks.

A closely related Shijiahe plaque is preserved in the Art Institute of Chicago (accession no. 1950.372, fig. 1) and was included in the Museum’s exhibition, Edward and Louise B. Sonnenschein collects ion of Archaic Chinese Jades, Chicago, 1952, pl. XXXVI, cat. no. 2. The top of a bar-shaped jade plaque in the collects ion of the National Museum of Asian Art, Washington, D.C. (accession no. LTS1985.1.276.2) has a virtually identical mask to the present piece on one side and a related one on the reverse, gifted by John Gellatly, included in the exhibition 5000 Years of Chinese Jade: Featuring Selections from the National Museum of History, Taiwan, and the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, San Antonio Museum of Art, Texas, 2011-2, cat. no. 7.

Compare two other mask-shaped, flat plaque ornaments; a smaller one, also formerly in the collects ion of John Gellatly and now in the National Museum of Asian Art (accession no. LTS1985.1.276.3); the other, slightly wider and the face pierced with a hole, formerly in the Yang-te-t’ang collects ion, included in the collects ors’ Exhibition of Archaic Chinese Jades, National Palace Museum, Taipei, 1995, cat. no. 18, recently sold at Christie’s Hong Kong, 29th November 2017, lot 2722.