Chinese pottery and porcelain; vol. 2. Ming and Ch'ing Porcelain

by R. L. Hobson

A good instance of the kind of illustrated book which supplied the porcelain decorator with designs is the Yü chih kêng chih t’u (Album of Ploughing and Weaving, compiled by Imperial order), which deals with the cultivation of rice and silk in some forty illustrations. It was first issued in the reign of K’ang Hsi, and there are copies of the original and of several later editions in the British Museum. A specimen of famille rose porcelain in the Franks Collection is decorated with a scene from this work, and in the Andrew Burman Collection there are two famille verte dishes with designs from the same source. In the Burdett Coutts Collection, again, there is a polygonal bowl with subjects on each side representing the various stages of cotton cultivation, evidently borrowed from an analogous work.

PLATE 103

Club-shaped (rouleau) Vase finely painted in famille verte enamels with panel designs in a ground of chrysanthemum scrolls in iron red; brocade borders. Last part of the K’ang Hsi period (1662–1722)

Height 17 inches.

Salting Collection (Victoria and Albert Museum).

Signatures and seals of the artist usually attached to a stanza of verse, or a few phrases which allude to the subject, are often found in the field of the pictorial designs. Fig. 1 of Plate [102], for instance, belongs to a series of beautiful dishes in the Dresden collection, which display the same seal—apparently[317] wan shih chü (myriad rocks retreat), the studio name not, I think, of the porcelain painter but of the artist whose picture was copied on the porcelain. There are numerous examples of similar seals in the field of the design, and we shall return to the subject later in a place where important issues turn on the solution of the problem which it raises.[318]

The types of famille verte porcelain are extremely numerous, almost as varied as those of the blue and white (p. [136]). Like the latter they include much that was obviously made for European consumption, and most of the groups which were singled out from the mass of blue and white for special description can be paralleled in the famille verte. The thin, crisp, moulded ware with petal-shaped panels and lobed borders, the group with the “G” mark, and many other types are found with the same peculiarities of paste and glaze, and even the same design painted in on-glaze enamels. As in the case of the blue and white, the quality of this export ware varies widely, and the individual specimens will be judged by the drawing of the designs and the purity and fire of the enamels.

A few of the more striking types are illustrated on Plates [103] and [104]. Perhaps the most sumptuous effects of this colour scheme are displayed in the vases decorated with panel designs surrounded by rich diapers borrowed from silk brocades. A favourite brocade pattern consists of single blossoms or floral sprays woven into a ground of transparent green covering a powder of small brown dots. This dotted green ground is commonly known as “frog’s spawn,” and another diaper of small circles under a similar green enamel is easily recognised under the name of “fish roe.” But the variety of these ground patterns is great, and in spite of their prosaic nomenclature they render in a singularly effective manner the soft splendour of the Chinese brocades.

In dating the famille verte porcelains the collector will find his study of the blue and white of great assistance. There is, for instance, the well-known type of export ware—sets of vases with complex moulding, and dishes and plates, etc., with petal-shaped lobes on the sides or borders. The central design of the decoration commonly consists of ch’i lin, and phœnix, sea monsters (hai shou), storks or ducks beside a flowering tree or some such familiar pattern; and the surrounding petal-shaped panels are filled each with a growing flower, or a vignette of bird and plant, plant and insect, or even a small landscape. These bright but often perfunctorily painted wares are paralleled in the early K’ang Hsi blue and white. They are among the first Chinese polychrome porcelains to be copied by the European potters. See Plate [107].