The enamelled wares are much more attractive, and many of the rice bowls are prettily decorated in soft colours. The Peking or medallion bowls, for instance, are little if anything below the standard of previous reigns, and in addition to the medallions in engraved enamel grounds of pink, green, grey, etc., outside, the interior is often painted in underglaze blue. There are tasteful bowls with white bamboo designs reserved in a ground of coral red, and there are dishes with blackthorn boughs with pink blossom in a white ground. The Yung Chêng style of underglaze blue outlines with washes of thin-transparent enamels was also affected, but the most characteristic enamelling of the period is executed in a mixture of transparent and opaque enamels, a blend of famille verte and famille rose. This colouring, soft and subdued, but often rather sickly in tone, is frequently seen on bowls and tea wares with Taoist subjects, such as the Eight Immortals, the fairy attendants of Hsi Wang Mu in boats, or the goddess herself on a phœnix passing over the sea to the t’ien t’ang or cloud-wrapt pavilions of Paradise, preceded by a stork with a peach of longevity in its beak. The sea is usually rendered by a conventional wave pattern delicately engraved in greenish white, and sometimes the ground of the design is washed with the same thin, lustrous, greenish white, which was remarked on a group of porcelains described on page 151. The porcelain of these bowls has a white, if rather chalky, body and a greenish white glaze of exaggerated oily sheen, and of the minutely bubbled, “muslin-like” texture which is common to Japanese porcelains. But the ordinary Tao Kuang wares are of poor material, greyish in tone and coarser in grain, with the same peculiarities in the texture of the glaze in an exaggerated degree.
Plate 131.—Eighteenth Century Painted Porcelain.
Fig. 1.—Plate painted in black and gold, European figures in a Chinese interior. Yung Chêng period. Diameter 9 inches. British Museum.
Fig. 2.—Dish with floral scrolls in famille rose enamels in a ground of black enamel diapered with green foliage scrolls. Ch’ien Lung period. Diameter 23¼ inches. Wantage Collection.
Plate 132.—Vase painted in mixed enamels, an Imperial park and a bevy of ladies. Wantage Collection.
Deep ruby pink borders with coloured floral scrolls and symbols. Ch’ien Lung mark. About 1790. Height 30 inches.
A typical example of the fine Tao Kuang rice bowl with Taoist design in the Franks Collection, delicately painted in mixed colours, which recall the Ku-yüeh-hsüan ware of the early Ch’ien Lung period, has the palace mark, Shên tê t’ang,[472] in red under the base. A specimen with this mark in the Hippisley Collection[473] is inscribed with a poem by the Emperor Tao Kuang, definitely fixing the date of this hall mark, which is found on choice porcelains made for Imperial use. It occurs on a vase of fine workmanship in the British Museum, decorated with polychrome five-clawed dragons in a lavender enamel ground, of which the base and interior are coated with blue green enamel; and we have already[474] commented on an interesting dish with archaic designs in Ming red and green, which is explained in the mark as an “imitation of the antique made for the Shên-tê Hall.”
It is worthy of note that most of the porcelain with hall and studio marks in red belong to the nineteenth century, chiefly to the Tao Kuang period. Several of these marks are figured and explained on p. [220] (vol. i.), but it may be useful if we describe here a few of the specimens on which they occur. The hall mark, Ch’êng tê t’ang, appears on a shallow bowl in the Franks Collection painted inside with a coiled dragon in green and a border of bats in red, while outside is a landscape carefully painted in mixed colours in a style similar to Plate [125], Fig. 3. The latter has the Imperial hall mark, Hsü hua t’ang, with addition of the word tsêng (for presentation), and it has besides an inscription proclaiming that it is the “cup of him who departed as General and returned as Grand Secretary” (ch’u chiang ju hsiang chih pei). It is painted with a scene in the palace grounds with the Emperor receiving a military officer.[475] A pretty bowl in the Franks Collection with rockery, flowering plants, fungus, etc., in colours has the palace mark, ssŭ pu t’ang; and there are two saucer dishes with Buddhist decoration of palmettes in cruciform arrangement, and a border of Sanskrit characters painted in underglaze blue with washes of transparent enamels marked respectively Ts’ai jun t’ang, and Ts’ai hua t’ang (hall of brilliant colours and hall of brilliant decoration), which are probably synonymous.