Page 155 - Chinese pottery and porcelain : an account of the potter's art in China from primitive times to the present day

Wan Li (1573-1619) 85

reigns of Wan Li and K'ang Hsi. It was a distracted time when

the potters must have depended largely upon their foreign trade in

default of Imperial orders, and it is probable that much of this

ware, characterised by strong, rather coarse make, greyish glaze and

boldly executed decoration in the Wan Li colour scheme, belongs to

this intermediate period. The vases usually have the flat unglazed

base which characterises the blue and white of this time.^ Two

handsome beakers, with figure subjects and borders of the peach,

pomegranate and citron, and a beautiful jar with phoenix beside

a rock and flowering shrubs, in the British Museum, seem to belong

to this period, but there are numerous other examples, many of

which are coarse and crude, and obviously made wholesale for the

export trade.

Among the various examples of Wan Li polychrome exhibited

at the Burlington Fine Arts Club in 1910, there was one which

calls for special mention, a box^ with panels of floral designs

surrounded by fruit and diaper patterns in the usual colours of

the wu ts'ai, with the addition of an overglaze blue enamel. It is

true that this blue enamel was clearly of an experimental nature

and far from successful, but its presence on this marked and in-

dubitable Wan Li specimen is noteworthy. For it has long been

an article of faith with collectors that this blue enamel does not

antedate the Ch'ing dynasty, being, in fact, a characteristic feature

of the K'ang Hsi famille verte porcelain. The rule still remains an

excellent one, and this solitary exception only serves to emphasise

its general truth, showing as it does that so far the attempts at a

blue enamel were a failure. But at the same time the discovery

is a warning against a too rigid application of those useful rules of

thumb, based on the generalisation from what must, after all, be a

limited number of instances.

Marked examples of Wan Li monochromes are rarely seen, but
we may assume that the glazes in use in the previous reigns con-

—tinued to be made blue, lavender, turquoise, violet and aubergine

brown, yellow in various shades, leaf green, emerald green, apple

—green, celadon, coffee brown, and golden brown besides the more

or less accidental effects in the mottled and flambe glazes. The plain

white bowls of the period had a high reputation, ^ and a good speci-

men in the British Museum, though far from equalling the Yung

Lo bowl (Plate 59), is nevertheless a thing of beauty. The white

* See p. 90. H« 17, exhibited by Mr. G. Eumorfopoulos. ^ See p. 4.