Page 297 - 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 173

only because it has been recently favoured with particular

attention by collectors. This is what we are pleased to call " Chinese

Imari." Our ceramic nomenclature has never been noted for

its accuracy, and like good conservatives we hold firmly to the old
names which have been handed down from days when geography

was not studied, and from ancestors who were satisfied with old

Indian china, or Gombroon ware, as names for Chinese porcelain.

So Meissen porcelain is still Dresden, the blue and white of Ching-

te Chen is Old Nanking, Chinese export porcelain painted at Canton

with pink roses is Lowestoft, and the ware made at Arita, province

of Hizen, in Japan, is Imari, because that is the name of the seaport
from which it was shipped. In fact, there are many shops where

you cannot make yourself understood in these matters unless you

call the wares by the wrong name.
The Arita porcelain in question, this so-called Imari, was made

from the middle of the seventeenth century onw^ards, and it must

have competed seriously with the export wares of Ching-te Chen.

At any rate, it w^as brought to Europe in large consignments by the

Dutch traders, who enjoyed the privilege of a trading station on

the island of Deshima, after the less politic Portuguese had been
driven out of Nagasaki in 1632. For the moment we are specially
concerned with two types of Arita ware. The first is distinguished

by slight but artistic decoration in vivid enamels of the jamille verte,

supplemented by gilding and occasionally by underglaze blue.

Favourite designs are a banded hedge, prunus tree, a Chinese boy

and a tiger or phoenix ; two quails in millet beside a flowering prunus ;

simple flowering sprays or branches coiled in circular medallions
;

or only a few scattered blossoms. Whatever the nature of the

design, it was artistically displayed, and in such a manner as to

enhance without concealing the fine white porcelain. This is what
the old catalogues call the premiere qualite coloriee de Japan, and a
very popular ware it was in eighteenth century Europe, when it

was closely copied on the early productions of the St. Cloud, Chantflly,
Meissen, Chelsea, and other porcelain factories. To-day it is com-

monly known as Kakiemon ware, because its very distinctive style
of decoration is traditionally supposed to have been started by a
potter named Kakiemon, who, with another man of Arita, learned
the secret of enamelling on porcelain from a Chinese merchant

about the year 1646.

The second type was made entirely for the European trade,