And here we may point out how self-contained was the development of Japanese porcelain during the palmy days of the Tokugawa régime (say from 1650 to 1850). As in the case of the kindred arts of metalware and lacquer, any European influence was quite of a casual and what we may call fanciful nature; while the new methods of decoration that came into use in
Plate XXV.
Japanese. Imari ware.
China in the eighteenth century were never recognised or copied, even if they were known. What imitation there was of China was confined to the copying of Ming types; the Manchus, in fact, were never acknowledged by the Japanese, and their arts were under a taboo almost as strict as that applied to the civilisation of the West. No better instance of this conservatism could be given than the fact that the use of gold as a source of a red pigment, the basis of the famille rose in China, appears to have been unknown until the beginning of the nineteenth century, and even then the rouge-d’or was but sparingly applied. On the other hand, the Chinese were always eager, in the interest of trade, to copy the wares exported from Nagasaki, and we shall see later on what an influence the various products of the Hizen kilns had upon the porcelain of Europe.
These, then, were practically the only kinds of Japanese ceramic ware known in Europe until the opening of the country in our days—the blue and white or sometsuke, the ‘old Japan’ or nishiki-de, and the peculiar type which we have classed as Kakiyemon. To this list we should perhaps add the plain white ware, much of which was subsequently decorated in Europe.
These wares were all of them made in the kilns near Arita, nor do they exhaust the products of even that district. But during the eighteenth century the manufacture of porcelain spread to other parts of Japan where porcelain was made exclusively for home consumption. Many of these kilns were established under princely patronage, some in the very gardens of the feudal lord, while a special interest is given to others by their association with certain skilled potters and their descendants, whose names, in opposition to what we found was the practice in China, we can thus connect with the wares.
But we will first say something about the composition and the processes of manufacture of the porcelain of Japan, dwelling, however, only on those few points where we find divergences from the practices obtaining in China.
In the first place, then, as to the composition of the paste. To judge from the few trustworthy analyses of Imari ware that have been made, the paste would seem to be of a very abnormal type; the amount of silica—70 to 74 per cent.—is quite unusual; there is an almost total absence of lime, so important a constituent of Chinese porcelain; while we find from 4 to 5 per cent. of the alkalis. But, in place of the potash found in the wares of China, in the Japanese paste the prevailing alkali is invariably soda.