Page 276 - Chinese pottery and porcelain : an account of the potter's art in China from primitive times to the present day

164 Chinese Pottery and Porcelain

black formed of the brown black pigment under washes of trans-

parent green, a blue enamel of violet tone, and the thin iron red.

The blue enamel and the red are sometimes omitted, leaving a soft

harmony of green, aubergine and yellow in which green plays the

Achief part. little gilding is often used to heighten parts of the

design.

As for the shapes of the jamille verte porcelain, they are sub-

stantially the same as those of the blue and white and call for no

further comment. The designs, too, of the painted decoration are

clearly derived from the same sources as those in the blue and white,

viz. books of stock patterns, pictures, illustrations of history

and romance, and of such other subjects as happened to be specially

appropriate or of general interest.

To take a single instance of a pictorial design, the familiar rockery

and flowering plants (peony, magnolia, etc.) and a gay-plumaged

pheasant lends itself to effective treatment in enamel colours. It

is taken from a picture, probably Sung in origin, but there are many
repetitions of it in pictorial art, one of which by the Ming painter
Wang-yu is in the British Museum collection.^ The original is said

to have been painted by the Emperor Hui Tsung in the beginning

—of the twelfth century. Another familiar design quails and millet
—is reputed to have been painted by the same Imperial artist.

A good instance of the kind of illustrated book which supplied

the porcelain decorator with designs is the Yii chih keng chih Vu

(Album of Ploughing and Weaving, compiled by Imperial order),

which deals with the cultivation of rice and silk in some forty illus-

trations. It was first issued in the reign of K'ang Hsi, and there

are copies of the original and of several later editions in the British

AMuseum. specimen of famille rose porcelain in the Franks Collec-

tion is decorated with a scene from this work, and in the Andrew

Burman Collection there are two famille verte dishes with designs

from the same source. In the Burdett Coutts Collection, again,

there is a polygonal bowl with subjects on each side representing

the various stages of cotton cultivation, evidently borrowed from

an analogous work.

Signatures and seals of the artist usually attached to a stanza

of verse, or a few phrases which allude to the subject, are often found

in the field of the pictorial designs. Fig. 1 of Plate 102, for instance,

belongs to a series of beautiful dishes in the Dresden collection, which

1 Catalogue of the 1910 exhibition. No. 84.