Porcelain

59

‘Muffle-colours,’ of course in these later examples painted over the glaze, and therefore to be classed as enamels.

60

In this respect we may compare such decoration to a dark water-colour drawing on white paper, where advantage is only taken of the white ground for scattered lights here and there.

61

We must always think of this great man in connection with his contemporary in France, Louis xiv. Omitting the early years of the French king, before he attained his majority, the two long reigns run almost exactly together.

62

This list is to be found in Julien’s book. Dr. Bushell has since given a more accurate translation, accompanied by a careful analysis (Chinese Ceramics, chapter xii.).

63

The red paste of early times was, however, imitated, and a ‘copper paste’ is also mentioned in connection with these old wares. The last expression is obscure, but it has certainly nothing to do with an enamel on copper.

64

On the other hand, on some large showy vases of this time we can trace a series of rings, giving an uneven surface. These are caused either by the undue pressure of the potter’s fingers (vissage), or perhaps in part by the way in which the successive stages of the jar were built up with ‘sausage-shaped’ rolls of clay.

65

How this iron red was manipulated, apparently at a transition period, so as to obtain an effect approaching that of the rouge d’or, is described on page 162.

66

A ruby-red can be obtained by careful manipulation from gold alone. We may regard the addition of tin as a convenient method of developing the colour which was apparently known to the mediæval alchemists.

67

It would be a point of special interest to determine the date when these two colours—the pink (used as a ground) and the opaque turquoise blue—were first used in China. Their presence together with the lemon-yellow gives perhaps the first note of a period of decline. There is in the British Museum a bowl and saucer covered on the outside with this rose enamel and bearing this unusual inscription—‘the Sin-chou year occurring again.’ This expression was referred by Franks to the sixty-first year of the reign of Kang-he, when the cyclical year in which his reign began recurred again, an unprecedented fact in Chinese history. In the same collection is a saucer-shaped plate with a pale pink ground with the mark of the period Yung-cheng. But the evidence in favour of a somewhat later date for the fully developed use of the rouge d’or seems to me fairly strong. Dr. Bushell, however, tells me that he has seen other examples where the same inscription is found upon ware decorated with the rouge d’or, and that he accepts the early date (1722) on the Sin-chou plate. I return to this question on page 136.

68

Julien omitted this curious passage in his translation as devoid of interest!

69

There are two magnificent vases of the black lacquered ware, each about eight feet high, in the Musée Guimet, and of the brown variety a well-preserved spherical bowl may be seen at South Kensington.

70

The snuff-bottles of the Chinese represent the inro of the Japanese. Both were originally used for pills and for eye medicine.

71

Dr. Bushell tells us that she is an accomplished artist and calligraphist, and that her autograph signature is much valued. She is said to have sent down from the palace, to be copied at King-te-chen, bowls and dishes of the time of Kien-lung, just as that emperor in his day forwarded from Pekin examples of Sung and Ming wares with the same object. So the old tradition is kept up!

72

These references are to the plates of marks at the end of the book.

73

See, however, p. 110 note, for a curious instance of its use.

74

A good example of a date-mark of Wan-li in this position may be seen on the vase reproduced on Pl. vii. Fig. 2.

75

Why, by the way, do we find, in catalogues otherwise well edited, porcelain ascribed to the Kang-he dynasty? One might as well speak of the Louis xiv. dynasty.

76

At least such was the case when the Canal was in working order. For some time since, the Grand Canal has only been navigable when the country is flooded.

77

I cannot find the exact date of the first publication of these letters. In the eighteenth century we find them generally quoted from Du Halde.

78

This is a passage made use of by Longfellow in those often-quoted lines beginning—

‘A burning town, or seeming so,Three thousand furnaces that glow,’ etc.

79

If we are to understand by this ‘transparent pebble’ some form of arsenic, for it would seem that arsenic (and not tin as with us) is the base of the opaque white enamels of the Chinese, it is difficult to believe that so volatile a substance could be thus prepared.

80

For the use of steatite in English porcelain see chap. xxii. At Vinovo, in Piedmont, another magnesian mineral has been employed for the paste.

81

In the following summary I have kept to the Père D’Entrecolles’s words as far as possible, but with considerable abbreviations.

82

We must here think of the more sober famille verte lantern at South Kensington, rather than of the magnificent specimen of pierced work in the Salting collection, which is of later date.

83

The unique bowl of Chinese porcelain illustrated in Du Sartel’s book, of which the outside is decorated in black and gold in imitation of the Limoges enamel of the renaissance, may have had some such origin. This piece, on which even the initials of the original French artist have been copied, was formerly in the Marquis collection, and is now to be seen in the Grandidier Gallery at the Louvre.

84

We have already alluded to this point, à propos of a bowl in the British Museum; see p. 110 note.

85

This branch of the subject is fully worked out in chapter xvii. of Dr. Bushell’s work.

86

When compared with a similar collection of European wares, perhaps the most noticeable difference is the small number of vessels adapted to pouring. So much is this the case that when we find a spout or lip on a specimen of Chinese porcelain, the piece takes at once a somewhat exotic aspect, and we are reminded of the Arab Ibraik, or the European ewer.

87

It is a curious fact that London chemists now send out their pills in little glass bottles almost identical in shape and size with these Chinese yao-ping.

88

The word is used in a restricted sense as explained above.

89

We have far too often to fall back on names of French origin. Our colour-vocabulary in the case of the enamels and glazes of porcelain is a sadly poor one.

90

In the case of some monochrome ware the colour may have been painted on the raw paste or on the biscuit, and a colourless glaze then added; or again, as in the case of the coral red mentioned below, it may be painted like an enamel over the glaze.

91

It must, however, be remembered that this carved lacquer itself is sometimes applied as a coating to porcelain in China.

92

It would be convenient to have a name to include the whole series—the flambé, the sang de bœuf, the lavender Yuan, and perhaps also the peach-bloom and the ‘robin’s egg.’ I would propose to include all these classes under the head of transmutation glazes.

93

A French writer compares the effect to the ‘palette d’un coloriste montrée sous un morceau de glace’ (E. de Goncourt, La Maison d’un Artiste).

94

There were many kinds of ‘furnace transmutations’ known to the Chinese, mostly of a miraculous nature (see Bushell, p. 219).

95

When applied to the whole surface, a similar slip forms the ground on which the decoration is painted in the case of many kinds of European and Saracenic fayence, but in such ware the slip is used to conceal a more or less coarse and coloured paste.

96

It may, however, be noticed, on close examination, that the crackles do not seem to be developed in the lower glaze covered by the slip. This would rather point to both the first and the second coats of glaze, as well as the intermediate slip, being all applied before the firing.

97

Not that we need claim any great age for these plates, but it is in such places that old types (as e.g. the celadon) are likely to continue in fashion.

98

We may perhaps connect the first steady export of ‘blue and white’ direct to Europe with the establishment of the Dutch at Nagasaki, where they probably employed Chinese workmen.

99

So what is by far the most successful imitation of Chinese ‘blue and white’ ever produced in Europe was made by the Dutch, in the enamelled fayence of Delft, about the middle of the century.

100

In Japanese art also we find the prunus as a symbol of the approaching spring, but there the branches are covered with freshly fallen snow. The contrast of the weather in early spring, in China and Japan respectively, could not be better expressed—by ice in the one case, by soft thawing snow in the other.

101

Dr. Zimmermann, the curator of the Dresden Museum, regards the black division of the famille verte as a product of the demi grand feu, i.e. he holds that the black and green was painted on the biscuit. But this is certainly not the case with the fully developed examples. I may say that this class is only represented at Dresden by some small roughly painted plates.

102

We find it so used, however, upon the Japanese ‘Kakiyemon’ porcelain, some of which cannot be much later than the middle of the seventeenth century.

103

Since writing this I have discovered a tall-necked bottle of this ware at South Kensington, which is stated to have been purchased in Persia (Pl. xx.).

104

That is to say, no attempt was ever made to imitate the material—the hard paste.

105

An important collection of armorial china was bequeathed to the Museum in 1887 by the Rev. Charles Walker.

106

This plate belongs to a group in which the arms, above all the mantlings, are in the style of the seventeenth century. On these the gules is always rendered by an opaque iron-red, although the new rouge d’or is freely used in the rest of the decoration. I learn from my friend Colonel Croft Lyons that the arms on this plate are those of Leake Okeover, who was born in 1701. The initials, repeated four times on the margin, L. M. O., stand for Leake and his wife Mary. The plate, therefore, cannot well have been painted before, say, 1725.

107

This class of Kuang yao must not be confused with the old heavy pieces of Yuan ware mentioned on p. 77.

108

I quote, with a few contractions, from the edition of 1774.

109

I have examined the Korean pottery in the British Museum, at Sèvres, and that in some of the German museums, but I have not seen the specimens in the Ethnographical Museum at Hamburg, which are said to be very remarkable.

110

For an account of the exploration of Sawankalok, see Man, the volume for 1901. By the kind permission of Mr. Read I have been able to closely examine the specimens which are now deposited in the British Museum.

111

We may mention that the Japanese appear also to give the name of Kochi to other wares, especially to the deep blue and turquoise porcelain with decoration in ribbed cloisons which we have attributed to early Ming times.

112

We may compare with this the impulse given, some four hundred years later, in Europe, to the spread of the use of porcelain at the time when tea was first introduced in the West.

113

See page 66. This Sung ware is known to the Japanese as ‘Temmoku,’ and is highly esteemed by them.

114

Many, however, of these so-called Jesuit plates were probably painted at King-te-chen at a later date. Christianity was finally and ruthlessly crushed in Japan after the rebellion of 1637: in China it was tolerated up to the close of the reign of Kang-he (1721). I must refer back to a quotation from the Père D’Entrecolles given on p. 133. See also a curious note in Marryat, where a statuette of Quanyin, with the boy patron of learning, is described as ‘a Virgin and Child.’—Pottery and Porcelain, p. 293.

115

In the Dresden collection are several cases full of this early Japanese blue and white.

116

The Chinese, however, were given much greater liberty than the Dutch.

117

See the South Kensington handbook on Japanese pottery, p. 86. In the chapter on Japanese ceramics contained in the magnificently illustrated History of the Arts of Japan, published in 1901 in connection with the Paris Exhibition, a little further light is thrown on the history of porcelain in that country. But in this work and in the other guides published at the time of our American and European exhibitions (and the same may be said of the Japanese report contained in the South Kensington handbook), the same scanty materials are served up again and again.

118

Ambassades Mémorables de la Compagnie des Indes Orientales des Provinces Unies vers les Empereurs du Japon, Amsterdam, 1680, Part ii. p. 102. I take the reference from Marryat, but I have not been able to find the book.

119

We know of no Chinese type to which we can refer this decoration. Certain points of resemblance have been found with the work of the great contemporary Japanese artist Tanyu. The most characteristic motifs are the tiger, the dancing boy with long sleeves, and the straw hedge.

120

The ‘old Japan’ was at one time closely copied at King-te-chen for exportation to Europe. (Cf. Pl. xxiv. 1.)

121

The composition of the Owari porcelain is more normal, the silica only amounting to 65 per cent.; but as the paste contains little or no lime, it comes nearer to the hard porcelain of Berlin than to the milder Chinese type.

122

Much, however, of the china-stone of Cornwall differs little in composition from the Imari stone; but the latter contains, as we have said, soda, in place of the more usual potash.

123

It is to this Koransha, I understand, that we are indebted for the historical notices on Japanese porcelain that have appeared on the occasion of our successive international exhibitions (see above, p. 183 note).

124

Captain Brinkley speaks of the lower edge being serrated, but I have never seen any specimen of this serration.

125

Another seal was granted to Zengoro with the inscription (reading in Chinese) Hopin chi liu (Pl. B. 24). This refers to an old tradition that Shun, a Chinese emperor of very early date, had, before his accession to the throne, made pottery at a place called Hopin, in Honan. This story is told by Ssuma Chien, the ‘Herodotus of China,’ and would be well known to scholars in Japan. These characters are sometimes found on Japanese ware. (Cf. Bushell, chap. i., and the Franks catalogue, fig. 191, where, however, the words are wrongly interpreted.) Yeiraku, I should add, may be also rendered ‘long content.’

126

This question of the relation between the Kishiu, the Kochi of the Japanese, and our class of old Ming wares with coloured glazes, is full of difficulties. It remains for some Japanese connoisseur, who is at the same time both an expert in ceramics and a good Chinese scholar, to clear it up.

127

This work is analysed by Dr. Hirth in his essay on Ancient Chinese Porcelain already referred to.

128

Dr. Meyer, who brought this collection together, has always supported the theory that in early days no true porcelain was ever made except in China. In support of this he points to the specimens, including ‘wasters,’ from Sawankalok in Siam, in this collection, as being all of stoneware. We have seen (p. 173) that more recent excavations in the same neighbourhood have brought to light fragments of true porcelain of undoubted local manufacture. It is true, however, that most of the examples of celadon in the Dresden collection are of what we should call a kaolinic stoneware.

129

I suppose that Franks, who refers to this notice, was satisfied that the present really consisted of Chinese ware. Many slips have been made in quoting this passage, but I will only point out that Nureddin, who died in 1173, has no claim to the title of caliph.

130

This belief, however, long lingered not only in the East, but even in Europe. According to some, if poison was present, the bowl lost its transparency; others state that the liquid would boil up in the centre, remaining clear round the edge. In a French comic poem, written as late as 1716, among other merits possessed by vessels of Chinese porcelain, it is claimed for them that—

‘Ils font connaître les mystèresDes bouillons à la Brinvillière.’

131

By far the greater number of the fragments are of local or at least of Saracenic origin, and many of them may be as old as the date mentioned in the text. But at Fostât, at all events, some of the pot-sherds are of a much later date. There are important collections of fragments from these rubbish-heaps both in the British Museum and at South Kensington.

132

Professor Karabacek of Vienna quotes from the encyclopædist Hâdji Khalifa, who died in 1658: ‘The precious magnificent celadon dishes seen in his time were manufactured and exported at Martabani, in Pegu.’

133

The little bowl of apple-green porcelain in the British Museum, ‘garnished’ with a mounting of the time of Henry viii., has perhaps as long a European history. The two ‘Trenchard’ bowls (in spite of the later date of the mounting) probably came to England in 1506.

134

I think that it is not unlikely that during the time that King-te-chen lay waste, kilns may have been erected somewhere in the neighbourhood of the Canton river, and that from these kilns originated much of the rough ware, hastily decorated in blue, that reached India and Persia in such quantities at this time (cf. the statement of Raynal quoted on p. 166). We have spoken in the last chapter of the influence of these events upon the Japanese trade.

135

I am referring, of course, to Stuart times. In the eighteenth century the so-called Gombroon ware was of Persian origin, and recognised as such in England.

136

The word ‘china’ is used in this sense, I think, by no other European nation.

137

See, however, for the Portuguese merchants who sold porcelain in France, the note on page 230.

138

The Abbé Raynal, writing about 1770, says that connoisseurs divide Oriental porcelain into six classes—‘truitée, vieille blanche, de Japon, de Chine, le Japon Chiné et la porcelaine des Indes.’

139

Marryat’s extracts are unfortunately often carelessly quoted; nor is it easy in all cases to control them by reference to the originals.

140

August ii. certainly bought a collection of porcelain from the Bassetouche family for 6750 thalers. It would be interesting to know of what wares this collection consisted. The only further additions until quite recent times have been to the European department.

141

The tradition of the ‘dinner-service’ made in China for Charles v., and presented by him to Moritz of Saxony (or, as others say, captured from him by that prince), belongs to the same category of stories as that of the crusader’s cup. No such commission as this was possible at so early a date, and there is nothing in the Dresden collection that could be connected with such a service.

142

‘Menez-moi chez les PortugaisNous y verrons à peu de fraisDes marchandises de la Chine. . . de la porcelaine fine,’ etc.—Scarron, Paris Burlesque.

143

In 1689 Madame de Sévigné notes the quantity of Oriental porcelain imported at L’Orient.

144

Are we to identify these with some huge Imari vases, now in the Louvre, with coats of arms bearing the French lilies and the label of Orleans? Some similar vases, with the same arms, have lately been seen in dealers’ shops in London.

145

The catalogues of Gersaint and of some other early French collections may be found at South Kensington.

146

Passeri, writing in 1752 in favour of the then neglected majolica, claims that ‘la parte brutale dell’ uomo sarà a favor delle porcellane, ma l’intellettuale e raziocinativa giudicherà a favor delle nostre majoliche.’

147

Recent researches in the archives of Venice have proved that Oriental porcelain was comparatively abundant in Venice at the beginning of the sixteenth century. Dr. Ludwig has shown me extracts from the inventory of the property of a rich ‘cittadino’ who died in 1526, in which can be distinguished plain white, blue and white, and porcelain decorated with red, green, and gold.

148

It is quite possible that Palissy may have tried his hand at this problem. M. Solon has suggested that in the many years’ labour at Saintes (when attempting especially to imitate ‘the cup with white enamel’) Palissy was really seeking to make porcelain.

149

I take the following from the excellent catalogue of the Ceramic Museum at Limoges, by E. Garnier: ‘1125. Pot à Pommade, de forme cylindrique godronné à la partie inférieure et décoré en bleu d’une bande de lambrequins. Marque A.P.’ Some other small pieces in this museum are classed as Rouen porcelain.

150

Professor Church allows that ‘the substance of some of these statuettes is distinctly porcellanous.’ He found, however, in a fragment of this ware as much as 79·5 per cent. of silica, and only 12·5 per cent. of alumina (Cantor Lectures, 1881).

151

This feeling is well expressed in a contemporary drinking-song:—