The English amateur will naturally seek a field for his first studies in English porcelain. It wears a certain air of homeliness which endears it to his heart; its uses and forms are those which are familiar in the daily life of his countrymen; its decoration as a rule makes no exacting demands on his erudition in order to be fully understood. After English porcelain, the collector’s attention will most readily be turned to that of the continent of Europe.
His apprenticeship, the first of the three stages to which allusion has been made above, is thus spent in the study of the Western manifestations of the art. As yet he does not understand, and cannot appreciate at their true value, the Eastern wares from which the European trace their descent. In the course of his researches a curiosity can scarcely fail to be stirred in him to know more of these Oriental precursors. His curiosity deepens; his desire to satisfy it brings him at last under a new spell, and the second stage is reached. His enthusiasm is now all for the Chinese; its perfection of material and form, its dazzling beauty of colour, the artistic fitness of its decoration, engage his admiration more and more. Alien to his imagination as it is in conception, it nevertheless fascinates him ever more surely as he grows more familiar with it. The European china of his early collecting days pleases him no longer.
But there will follow a third stage, in which a more catholic taste is developed. The student of the Oriental can understand much in the Western wares that was meaningless so long as he was ignorant of the sources from which they were derived. His appreciation of the high artistic worth of the Chinese is undiminished, but his sympathy is now again awakened by the more humane qualities of the European, appealing as they do to kindred instincts in his own Western nature. He has now reached the point at which he is able to give its true value to all good work, whatever its origin may be. The excellences of the Eastern do not blind him to the merits of the Western; all alike in their several types of beauty are a joy to his soul.
PLATE 9
Vase, Chinese, period of Yung Chêng (1723–1735), with “five colour” design of archaistic style. Height, 18 in.
No. 3022-1853. See p. [26].
Unmarked.
