Page 275 - Chinese pottery and porcelain : an account of the potter's art in China from primitive times to the present day

K'ang Hsi Polychrome Porcelains 163

to which the Chinese use this convention) it was necessary to pile
up the layers of colour at the risk of unduly thickening the enamel.
But the connoisseur of to-day finds nothing amiss in these jewel-
like incrustations of colour, so long as the enamels are pure and
bright, and have not scaled off or suffered too severeh^ from the
wear to which their prominent surface is exposed.

It seems ^ that when the porcelain was destined to receive on-
glaze enamels (without any underglaze blue) a special glazing mix-
ture was used in which only one part of the softening element ^
was combined with thirteen of the ordinary glazing fluid. This
glaze was very w'hite and strong, and too opaque to do justice to
an underglaze blue.

There is a reference in the first letter of Pere d'Entrecolles to
a white colour which was used on the " porcelain painted in various
colours." It was fluxed with lead like the other enamel colours, and
it was also used mixed with the latter to modify their tint. In fact
there can be little doubt that it was arsenical white, an opaque

white familiar on the Yung Cheng and Ch'ien Lung porcelains, and

prominent in the famille rose palette, but not usually suspected
of such an early appearance as 1712, the date of the letter in question.

The designs of the famille verte porcelain, like those on the blue
and white, are first traced in outline and then filled in with washes
of colour. The outlines are in a dry dull pigment of red or brown
black tint, inconspicuous in itself, but acquiring prominence when
covered with transparent enamel. M. Grandidier tried to formulate
certain rules for these outlines which, if reliable, would simplify
greatly the task of dating the porcelains. On Ming ware, he said,
the outlines were blue ; on K'ang Hsi wares the face and body outlines
were red, those of the vestments and other objects black. Unfortu-
nately the first of these generalisations is wholly wrong, and the

second pointless, because only partly right.
Omitting the underglaze blue as foreign to this particular group

of famille verte under discussion, the colours consist of dark leaf
green often of a mottled appearance, a beautiful light apple green,
which is characteristic of the K'ang Hsi wares just as the blue green
is of the sixteenth century polychrome, an aubergine colour (derived
from manganese) which varies from purple brown to rosy purple,
a yellow of varying purity and usually of brownish tone, a green

1 See d'Entrecolles, second letter, section xii.
* Burnt lime and wood ashes. See p. 92.