Page 224 - Chinese pottery and porcelain : an account of the potter's art in China from primitive times to the present day

136 Chinese Pottery and Porcelain

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,^ 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 carry-
ing off a lady,^ and various scenes from romance and family life),
floral designs, deer, phoenixes, 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 jen) are familiar motives in Chinese decor-

ation, but this particular type, usually consisting of isolated figures
in small panels or separated from each other by a shrub or flower-
pot, and standing in a stereotyped pose, are, I think, ^ 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 apocry-

phal Ch'eng Hua date-mark, while others are marks of com-
mendation,^ such as ch'i chen ju yii (a rare gem like jade), yil (jade),

ya (elegant), and various hall-marks.
Yet another group of superior quality is obviously connected

with the European trade by a peculiar mark (see vol. i., p. 223) re-
sembling the letter C or G. It is most commonly represented by
pairs of bottles with globular body and tall, tapering neck, decorated

with flowing scrolls of curious rosette-like flowers, a design stated

with much probability to have been copied from Dutch delft. As
the Dutch design in question had evidently been based on a Chinese

original, the peculiar nature of the flowers explains itself. There

are other instances of patterns bandied in this way between the

^ There is a small collection of these porcelains salved from the sea and presented
to the British Museum by H. Adams in 1853 ; but there is no evidence to show which,
if any, were on boarS the Haarlem.

2 This design was copied on early Worcester blue and white porcelain.
3 In spite of Bushell's translation of a Ming passage which would lead one to tliink
otherwise ; see p. 40.
* See vol. i., p. 226.