Page 230 - Chinese pottery and porcelain : an account of the potter's art in China from primitive times to the present day

142 Chinese Pottery and Porcelain

The second type, which has only a dressing of steatite over
the ordinary body, has neither the same lightness nor the opacity
of the true steatitic ware, but it has the same soft white surface,
and is painted in the same style of line drawing.

There are, besides, other opaque and crackled wares painted
in underglaze blue, which are also described as " soft paste," and,
indeed, deserve the name far more than the steatitic porcelain.
The creamy, crackled copies of old Ting wares, for instance, made
with cliing tien stone, ^ are occasionally enriched with blue designs

;

and the ordinary stone-coloured crackle with buff staining is also
painted at times with underglaze blue,- or with blue designs on
pads of white clay in a crackled ground.

On the other hand, there are numerous wares of the Yung Cheng
and Ch'ien Lung periods which are probably composed in part,
at least, of steatite. They are usually opaque, and the surface is

sometimes dead white, sometimes creamy and often undulating
like orange peel, and in addition to blue decoration, enamel paint-
ing is not infrequent on these later types. The purely steatitic
porcelains are generally of small size, which was appropriate to the
style of painting as well as to the expensive nature of the material.
The furniture of the scholar's table, with its tiny flower vases for
a single blossom, its brush washers and water vessels of fanciful
forms, its pigment boxes, etc., were suitable objects for the material,

and many of these little crackled porcelains are veritable gems.

Snuff bottles are another appropriate article, and a representative
collection of snuff bottles will show better than anything the great
variety of these mixed wares and so-called " soft pastes."

It has been already observed that crackled blue and white
porcelain of the steatitic kind is found with the date marks of
Ming Emperors, and there can be little doubt that it was made from
early Ming times, but as the style of painting seems to have known
no change it will be always difficult to distinguish the early
specimens. It is safe to assume that almost all the specimens in
Western collections belong to the Ch'ing dynasty, a few to the
K'ang Hsi period, but the bulk of the better examples to the reigns
of Yung Cheng and Ch'ien Lung. Modern copies of the older
wares also abound.

1 See p. 201.
* The use of crackle glaze over blue (porcelaine toute azuree) is noted by P^re d'Entre-
coUes in his first letter. See Bushell, op. cit., p. 195.