Read Ebook: Chinese pottery and porcelain; vol. 1. Pottery and early wares by Hobson R L Robert Lockhart

Font size: 10 px 15 px 20 px 25 px 30 px 35 px

Background color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Text color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Apply/Save settings

Ebook has 109 lines and 24821 words, and 3 pages

The fact is that dating of these glazed potteries is as difficult as that of the cognate glazed tiles, and it is as unreasonable to exclude a Ch?ing origin as it would be to exclude a Ming. The balance of probabilities, at any rate, is in favour of the bulk of them being no older than the eighteenth century.

Plate 53 illustrates a beautiful vase in the Eumorfopoulos Collection which belongs to a cognate group. It has a buff stoneware body, the ornament is outlined in relief, and the glazes which fill the outlines are very similar to those of our main group, though some of the colours are more transparent and glassy and wanting in the solidity of the latter. The chrysanthemum handles are a frequent feature of the vases of this class, of which a notable instance is in the Salting Collection. Plate 54 illustrates another vase of similar kind, but with lotus handles, lotus designs, and a fine turquoise ground. Of the same type, but less rare, are certain wide-mouthed jars, bowls, and flower pots with bold floral designs, lotuses, etc., outlined in fillets of clay and filled with the same kinds of glaze, the background now turquoise and now aubergine . The base is usually washed over with a thin purplish brown. These several types were copied in the Japanese Kishiu pottery in the nineteenth century, and though the copies are rarely difficult to distinguish by the eye alone the Japanese glazes will be found on handling to have a peculiar moist and rather sticky surface. Though no doubt of Ming origin, it is extremely probable that the manufacture of the Chinese bowls and flower pots of this class continued into the last dynasty.

Fig. 2 of Plate 56 exemplifies another kind of pottery with fine white body like pipeclay, and usually with sharply moulded designs in antique bronze style and in the bronze forms of beakers and four-legged incense burners. The glaze is usually leaf green, but it often breaks out into a frothy grey scum, such as is seen on some of the Canton and Yi-hsing glazed pottery. It is a common practice to label these wares as T?ang, but I am inclined to place them in a much more recent period , and to locate them among the miscellaneous Kuangtung wares, pending further information on the subject.

From another passage we learn that in the valleys of Ching and the hills of Shu there are black and yellow clays suitable for pottery; that the potters had their kilns in holes in the mountains; and that they used the yellow clay for the body of the ware and overlaid it with the black, making jars, drug pots, cauldrons, pots, dishes, bowls, sacrificial vessels, and the like. They also made one kind of ware which resembled that of Ch?n Chou.

Specimens of modern pottery in the Field Museum, Chicago, include ornamental wares such as pomegranate-shaped water pots, etc., covered with an oily green glaze recalling some of the Sung types. The body is apparently dark coloured, and shows brown at the edges where the glaze is thin. This ware is made at Ch??ng-tu in Szech?uan.

The modern potteries at Yo Chou in Shensi are represented in the Field Museum, Chicago, by a black-painted ware in Tz?? Chou style, by a greyish white ware with sketchy blue designs, and by a black slag-like earthenware which is extremely light to handle. It is also suggested that a well known type of pottery, painted with free floral designs in black and white on a creamy glaze which is stained a pinkish brown colour, is an earlier product of the same potteries.

The potteries at Ch??-yang Hsien in the Ch?n-ting Fu, in Chihli, are mentioned in the administrative records of the Ming dynasty in the Hs?an T? period, and again under the dates 1553 and 1563, as supplying wine jars and vases for the Court. This place is only a few miles east of Ting Chou, which was celebrated for its white wares in the Sung period, and these references carry the record of the industry in that district to the last part of the Ming dynasty. Unfortunately, nothing is said of the nature of the wares made at this time for the Court.

Reference is made elsewhere to the potteries at Wu-ch?ing Hsien, in the Peking district. Possibly these are the potteries described, by Bushell as still active in modern times. "The ordinary glaze," he remarks, "is a reddish brown of marked iridescence, shining with an infinity of metallic specks, an effective background to the moulded decoration which covers the surface. The designs are generally of hieratic character."

The "sun-stone" glazes made at the Rookwood Potteries and on the Lancastrian wares are of this kind, the infinity of metallic specks being due to "super-saturation" of the glaze with iron oxide. A specimen of this modern Peking ware may be seen in the British Museum.

The tile works at Liu-li-ch?, near Peking, date back to the Y?an dynasty, and their modern productions as represented in the Field Museum include a pottery with incised designs filled in with yellow, green, and dark aubergine glazes, not unlike in style to the Japanese Sanuki ware. Another type has forms taken from bronzes and is distinguished by a shining green glaze.

In the province of Shantung, besides the tile works at Lin-ch?ing, the important, potteries at Yen-sh?n Ch?n in the Ch?ing-chou Fu are noticed as follows: "The inhabitants have inherited from their ancestors the art of making good pottery. The usual wares are cisterns , jars , cauldrons , and such-like pottery , made without flaw. The profit to the people is not less than that made at Ching-t? Ch?n on the right bank of the Yangtze." Yen-sh?n Ch?n is quite close to Po-shan Hsien, and no doubt the industry at the two places is intimately connected. The latter, which is noted to this day for its manufactures of pottery and glass, has already been mentioned more than once.

The value of pottery for architectural purposes was recognised in China from the earliest times. Unglazed bricks and tiles of Han and pre-Han periods are preserved by Chinese collectors, particularly when they happen, as is often the case, to have inscriptions in old seal characters, or other ornament. The familiar Chinese roof tile is a long convex object like a horizontal section of a tube, and those intended for the border are ornamented at one end with a disc, usually stamped with a dragon or other design in sunk relief. Here and there, on the apex of the roof or at the corners, are ornamental tiles carrying figures of deities, heroes, mythical creatures or birds, modelled in the round and usually with great force and skill. Besides these, architectural mouldings and antefixal ornaments in pottery are commonly used on temples and pavilions of an ornamental kind.

The tile works at Liu-li-ch? date from the Y?an dynasty. They are also situated in the neighbourhood of Peking, but whether in the Wu-ch?ing Hsien or not, I have failed to discover.

When Peking became the capital of the Ch?ing emperors, no doubt the tile factories at Wu-ch?ing Hsien assumed still greater importance; and according to the catalogue of the exhibition in Paris in 1878, the neighbourhood of Amoy was then celebrated for its bricks and tiles. This branch of the potter's industry is represented by a small collection of bricks, tiles, mouldings, and antefixal ornaments in the British Museum. It includes unglazed bricks from the Great Wall of China, which may date from 220 B.C., a few Han bricks and tile-ends with moulded ornament; white porcelain bricks and coloured pottery tiles and mouldings from the Nanking pagoda; and tiles from the Ming tombs near Nanking, which were built in 1400 A.D., and like the pagoda destroyed in the T?aip?ing rebellion in 1853. The Nanking tiles and mouldings are of hard buff pottery with translucent glazes of green and yellow colour, minutely crackled, additional colours being formed with red and creamy white slips. The tile-ends are ornamented with dragon medallions.

Other architectural pottery in the same collection came from the Imperial pleasure grounds at Peking, which were wrecked in 1860. These include tiles and antefixal ornaments from the pavilions and temples in the Y?an Ming Y?an and from the Summer Palace, and a few blue-glazed tiles from the Temple of Heaven. Numerous tiles with relief figures and pottery figures from niches were picked up in the ruins of the temples and pavilions in the Imperial grounds after their capture in 1860; and many of the mouldings were found to display strong European influences, due, no doubt, to the designs of the Jesuits Attiret and Castiglione, who assisted the Emperor Ch?ien Lung in erecting some of the buildings. Some of these are in the British Museum besides antefixes in the form of yellow dragon heads from the Winter Palace at Peking and from the celebrated Temple of Kin-shan, or Golden Island, in the Yangtze; and a tile from the Huang-ss?, the Great Lama temple, built by K?ang Hsi in 1647. The tile in question is evidently part of a restoration, for it bears the date corresponding to 1770.

It is a common but illogical practice to assign all these figures in architectural pottery to the Ming dynasty; illogical, because so many of them have been brought from the Imperial buildings at Peking which are known to have been mostly erected in the K?ang Hsi and Ch?ien Lung period. On the other hand, nothing is more difficult to date than this type of glazed pottery, in which the ware, the colours, and the decorative traditions seem to have continued almost unchanged from the early Ming times to the present day. The tiles from the Nanking pagoda and from the eighteenth-century buildings at Peking are practically interchangeable.

Nor must we forget that the potters who made the architectural pottery often turned their hands and materials to the manufacture of vases and figures and other ceramic ornaments for domestic use, and even imposing altar sets for the temples. An important example of this work is seen in Fig. 2 of Plate 55, a large incense vase of traditional form with bowl-shaped body, wide mouth, two upstanding handles, and three feet with lion masks. It is ornamented with a peony scroll and two dragons in high relief, and is made of pottery with a dull turquoise green glaze. An inscription on the handles proclaims the fact that it was "dedicated by the chieftain Kuo Hsin-sh?; made in the eighth year of Chia Ching," i.e. 1529. In more recent times the tile works near Peking have turned their attention to the manufacture of vases and bowls with rich soft monochrome glazes, yellow, green, turquoise and aubergine in the manner of the similarly coloured porcelains which are highly prized, and, as Bushell tells us, "the soft excipient seems to impart an added softness" to the glazes. "The fact that yellow clay," he continues, "used often to be mixed with the porcelain earth in the old fabrics to enhance the brilliancy of the glaze colours, gives a certain vraisemblance to the fraudulent reproductions which I have seen sold for as many dollars as they would cost in cents to produce." It is unlikely that the issue of these by-products of the tile factories is confined to the neighbourhood of Peking. Among the miscellaneous potteries I should add that Ka-shan, in Chekiang, is reputed to have been noted in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries for a fine porcellanous stoneware with opaque, camellia-leaf green glaze minutely crackled.

FOOTNOTES:

MARKS ON CHINESE POTTERY AND PORCELAIN

THE custom of placing on works of art the name of the maker, the date of manufacture, or some sign or symbol indicating the intention with which they were made, dates back in China at least as far as the Han dynasty. Such marks occur on pottery and porcelain rarely at first, but with a frequency which increases in proportion as we draw nearer to modern times. They are incised or stamped in the soft body of the ware, or painted under the glaze or over it in enamel colours or gold; and they are generally placed on the base of the ware, though there are fairly numerous instances in which the mark is written along the mouth rim or in some other more or less conspicuous position.

The earliest marks, as far as I am aware, are incised, and those on the Han, T?ang, and Sung potteries, not to mention the intermediate dynasties, should be scrutinised with the greatest care to make sure whether the incisions were made before the pottery was baked or afterwards. There should be no difficulty in determining this point, for the lines cut with a sharp instrument in the fired ware are necessarily harder and less free than those incised in the soft clay, and the edges of the incisions will present obvious differences in the two cases. Unfortunately the early date-marks which I have seen up to the present have almost all been cut after the firing. It does not necessarily follow that such inscriptions are modern additions. Indeed in many cases they are in a style which is clearly old. But their value as evidence is very small, for it is impossible to prove the exact time of their carving; and at best we can only regard them as representing the opinion of some former owner as to the date of the vessel in question. At their worst, they are deliberate frauds added by modern vendors with intent to deceive.

The Yung Ch?ng and Ch'ien Lung porcelains are highly esteemed to-day, and consequently the marks of these periods are considered worthy of a place on modern imitations; but on the whole the bulk of the specimens bearing these marks will be found to belong to the period indicated, and the imitations are generally so coarse as to be unmistakable. The temptation to borrow the reign marks of the subsequent periods is so slight that we may safely accept the later marks as correct indications of date.

It will be seen from the foregoing notes that Chinese date marks must be treated with great caution. In fact it is safer to regard them merely as secondary evidence, first basing one's judgment on the paste and glaze, the style of decoration and the quality of the colours. The one exception to this declaration of unfaith is the marks on the Imperial porcelain. These would naturally be correct and reliable, except where deliberate imitations of the older wares were undertaken; and then, no doubt, the mark of the period imitated would be used to make the illusion complete. The Imperial marks were the work of calligraphers who were selected for the purpose, and the writing is careful and in good style. In fact a well-written mark is almost as certain a sign of Imperial ware as the five-clawed dragon itself.

At the private factories the marks were often carelessly, even illegibly, written, and probably little trouble was taken with this part of the decoration except on the choicer specimens. On a large proportion of the private wares the mark was omitted altogether.

The marks on Chinese pottery and porcelain may be conveniently grouped under the following headings:--

Date marks.

Hall marks.

Potters' names and factory marks.

Marks of dedication, felicitation, commendation, etc.

The date marks conform to the two Chinese systems of chronology, the cyclical and the reign names of the Emperors.

The system by which the years are divided into cycles of sixty, each year of the cycle having a name, carries back Chinese chronology to the year 2637 B.C., from which the first cycle is dated. We are at present in the 76th cycle.

The year names are composed of two characters, the first being one of the Ten Stems, and the second one of the Twelve Branches; and as the stems and the branches are taken in strict rotation, it is clear that the combinations will not be exhausted until sixty have been formed, that number being the least common multiple of ten and twelve.

The table of cycles subsequent to the Christian era, i.e. cycles 45-76, dating from 4-1928 A.D., will be useful in calculating the year of the cyclical dates with the help of the accompanying table of numerals:--

is the normal form; is commonly used for accounts; is used on drafts, pawntickets, etc.

TABLE OF CYCLICAL DATES FROM A.D. 4

CYCLE BEGINNING

CYCLE BEGINNING

In reckoning the date of an Emperor's reign it was not usual to include officially the year in which his predecessor had died, but to date the reign from the first day of the year following. Thus, though K?ang Hsi became Emperor in 1661, his reign is dated officially from 1662.

in the Ch??ng Hua period of the great Ming .

As already mentioned, the seal forms of the mark were frequently employed from the eighteenth century onwards . An archaic form of seal character occurs in the Yung Lo mark which is given below.

Hall marks are very frequent on the porcelains of the Ch?ing dynasty, and enough are given below to illustrate their various forms. Many of them are no doubt hall names of makers and decorators, and as such belong to the category of artists' signatures.

Special interest attaches to those hall marks which have been identified as referring to pavilions in the precincts of the Imperial palace. We are told by Bushell that the "fashion of inscribing upon porcelain made for the Imperial palace the name of the particular pavilion for which it was intended seems to have begun in the reign of Yung Ch?ng," and observation shows that these hall marks only become frequent on the later porcelains. In fact most of the examples with which I am acquainted are nearer in style to the Tao Kuang than to the Yung Ch?ng wares, and the majority of the hall marks written in red on the glaze will be found to be of early nineteenth century date.

HALL MARKS

PALACE HALL MARKS

Marks which include potters' names are rare on Chinese porcelain though frequent enough on pottery. But it will be remembered that at Ching-t? Ch?n at any rate the porcelain passed through so many hands that the individuality of the work was lost, and consequently a personal mark would be, as a rule, misleading. The question of signatures in the field of the decoration has been discussed with the conclusion that they belong rather to the artists who painted the original copied by the pot-painters than to the pot-painter himself.

Perhaps we should include here a fairly common type of mark, usually in the form of a small seal of a conventional and quite illegible character, which goes by the name of "shop marks." But it is not clear whether they refer to the maker or the firm who ordered the porcelain.

POTTERS' MARKS

MARKS ON KUANGTUNG WARE

MARKS ON FUKIEN WHITE PORCELAIN

POTTERS' NAMES, ETC.

In many cases the place of a date mark, hall mark, or potter's name is taken by a word or phrase commending or describing the ware or invoking a benediction on the possessor. Such marks may be conveniently subdivided into marks of dedication, felicitation, commendation; to which may be added symbols used as marks.

Share on: WhatsApp @Hash Facebook Tweet