Some of the purely floral patterns strike perhaps a more distinctive note. The “aster pattern,” for instance, is a design of stiff, radiating, aster-like flowers usually in a dark tone of blue and displayed on saucer dishes or deep covered bowls. Some of the specimens of this class appear to be a little earlier than K’ang Hsi. The so-called “tiger-lily” pattern illustrated by Fig. 2 of Plate [89] is usually associated with deep cylindrical covered bowls of fine material and painted in the choicest blue. A beaker (Plate [91], Fig. 2) shows a characteristic treatment of the magnolia, parts of the blossoms being lightly sculptured in relief and the white petals set off by a foil of blue clouding. It evidently belongs to a set of five (three covered jars and two beakers) made as a garniture de cheminée for the European market.
The squat-bodied bottle (Plate [92], Fig. 1) illustrates a familiar treatment of the lotus design, with a large blossom filling the front of the body.
But perhaps the noblest of all Chinese blue and white patterns is the prunus design (often miscalled hawthorn) illustrated by Plate [90], a covered vase once in the Orrock Collection and now in the Victoria and Albert Museum. The form is that of the well-known ginger jar, but these lovely specimens were intended for no banal uses. They were filled with fragrant tea or some other suitable gift, and sent, like the round cake boxes, by the Chinese to their friends at the New Year, but it was not intended that the jars or boxes should be kept by the recipients of the compliment.
The New Year falls in China from three to seven weeks later than in our calendar, and it was seasonable to decorate these jars with sprays and petals of the flowering prunus fallen on the ice, which was already cracked and about to dissolve. The design is symbolic of the passing of winter and the coming of spring; and the vibrating depths of the pure sapphire blue broken by a network of lines simulating ice cracks form a lovely setting for the graceful prunus sprays reserved in the pure curd-like white of the ware.
The prunus pattern has been applied to every conceivable form, whether to cover the whole surface or to serve as secondary ornament in the border of a design or on the rim of a plate, and the prunus jar appears in all qualities of blue and on porcelain good and bad, old and new. The graceful sprays have become stereotyped and the whole design vulgarised in many instances; and in some cases the blossoms are distributed symmetrically on a marbled blue ground as a mere pattern. But nothing can stale the beauty of the choice K’ang Hsi originals, on which the finest materials and the purest, deepest blue were lavished. The amateur should find no difficulty in distinguishing these from their decadent descendants. The freshness of the drawing, the pure quality of the blue, and the excellence of body, glaze, and potting are unmistakable. The old examples have the low rim round the mouth unglazed where the rounded cap-shaped cover fitted, and the design on the shoulders is finished off with a narrow border of dentate pattern. The original covers are extremely rare, and in most cases have been replaced with later substitutes in porcelain or carved wood.
There are, besides, a number of types specially prevalent among the export porcelains, some purely Chinese in origin, others showing European influence. Take, for example, the well-known saucer dish with mounted figures of a man and a woman hunting a hare—a subject usually known as the “love chase”—a free and spirited design, rather sketchily painted in pale silvery blue. The porcelain itself is scarcely less characteristic, a thin, crisp ware, often moulded on the sides with petal-shaped compartments, and in many ways recalling the earlier type described on p. [70]. It is, however, distinguished from the latter class by slight differences in tone and finish which can only be learnt by comparison of actual specimens. It is, moreover, almost always marked with a nien hao in six characters, whereas marks on the other type are virtually unknown. The nien hao is usually that of Ch’êng Hua, but an occasional example with the K’ang Hsi mark gives the true date of the ware.
A quantity of this porcelain was brought up by divers from wrecks of old East Indiamen in Table Bay, among which was the Haarlem, lost in 1648,[282] though most of the ships were wrecked at later dates. It is a thin and sharply moulded ware, often pure eggshell, and the blue varies from the pale silvery tint to vivid sapphire. The usual forms are of a utilitarian kind—plates, saucer dishes, cups and saucers, small vases and bottles, jugs, tankards, and the like—and the designs are not confined to the “love chase,” but include other figure subjects (e.g. a warrior on horseback carrying off a lady,[283] and various scenes from romance and family life), floral designs, deer, phœnixes, fish, birds, etc., and perhaps most often the tall female figures, standing beside flowering shrubs or pots of flowers, which are vulgarly known as “long Elizas,” after the Dutch lange lijsen (see Plate [92], Fig. 2).
Graceful ladies (mei jên) are familiar motives in Chinese decoration, but this particular type, usually consisting of isolated figures in small panels or separated from each other by a shrub or flowerpot, and standing in a stereotyped pose, are, I think,[284] peculiar to the export wares of the last half of the seventeenth century.
This same type of thin, crisply moulded porcelain was also painted with similar designs in famille verte enamels over the glaze. It has a great variety of marks, the commonest being the apocryphal Ch’êng Hua date-mark, while others are marks of commendation,[285] such as ch’i chên ju yü (a rare gem like jade), yü (jade), ya (elegant), and various hall-marks.
