Chinese Stone Stool/Table

A landscape inside a block of stone, complete with a horizon.

This stool or table is Ruyuan stone with a hard wood base, from Shaoguan in Guangdong Province, China, of indeterminate age. Chinese collectors have long sought stones whose natural patterns suggest painted scenery, and displayed them for the same quiet pleasure as a landscape scroll. Here a squared, glossy block shows pale cream fractured by fine lines, with dark and rust-red bands running across it like distant ridges and trees. It rests on a tall dark box base. Seventeen and a half inches high and eleven and a quarter wide.

Sit on it if you dare. It was here first.