Page 357 - Chinese pottery and porcelain : an account of the potter's art in China from primitive times to the present day

Yung Cheng Period (1723-1735) 211

required a more substantial construction, and such specimens as
Plate 120, are strongly built, though decorated in the same style as

the eggshell wares.

The decoration of these porcelains is scarcely less distinctive
than their colouring. The central design usually consists of one of
the following : a Chinese interior with figures of ladies and children,
groups of vases and furniture, baskets of flowers and dishes of fruit,
a pheasant on a rock, two quails and growing flowers, a cock and
peonies, etc. ; and these designs are enclosed by rich borders, some-
times totalling as many as seven in number, composed of hexagon
and square, lozenge, trellis or matting diapers, in varying colours,
and broken by small irregular panels of flowers or archaic dragons.
There are, of course, many other kinds of decoration on these wares.
Sometimes the whole designs is executed in opaque blue enamel,
sometimes it is black and gold. On some the borders are simpler,
merely delicately gilt patterns ; on others they are ruby pink, plain
or broken by enamelled sprays. On the vase forms the ruby either
covers the entire ground or is broken, as in Plate 121, Fig. 3, by
fan-shaped or picture-shaped panels with polychrome designs. The
painting is, as a rule, very finely and carefully executed, but almost
always in a distinctive style which is closely paralleled by the Canton

enamels.

Indeed, it is impossible to resist the conclusion that much of
this ware was actually decorated in the enamelling establishments

at Canton, the porcelain itself being sent in the white from Ching-te
Chen. The same designs are found on both the porcelain and the
enamels, and there is one instance at least of an artist whose paintings
were used on both materials, as is testified by his signature. This is
the painter whose art-name is Pai shih shan jen (hermit of the white

rock), or in a shortened form, Pai-shih (see vol. i., p. 223). He was

evidently a Cantonese, for one of his designs on a saucer in the British

Museum is inscribed Ling nan hui die (a Canton picture), the subject

being a vase of flowers and a basket of fruit. His signature is also
attached to a dish with cock and peonies in the Victoria and Albert
Museum,! and to a similar design figured by Jacquemart,^ which also

bears the date corresponding to 1724. It occurs, besides, fairly fre-
quently on Canton enamels, though in this case usually attached to
landscape designs. In all these instances, however, it is placed in the

^ Bushell, Chinese Art, vol. ii., fig. 61.
* Histoire de la porcelaine, pt. viii., fig. 3.