Page 403 - Chinese pottery and porcelain : an account of the potter's art in China from primitive times to the present day

Ch'ien Lung (1736-1795) 241

has none of the freedom and breadth of the older types. On the

whole, it is small wonder that the collector finds little to arouse
enthusiasm in the blue and white of this period, if we except the
steatitic ^ or " soft pastes," which are eagerly acquired.

Underglaze red painting, and the same in combination with blue
or with high-fired glazes and coloured slips, celadon, white, golden
brown, olive brown and coffee brown, were perpetuated from the
previous reigns ; and underglaze blue designs are found accom-
panied by yellow or coral red enamel grounds in old Ming style,
and even by famille rose painting.

Decoration in transparent glazes of three colours green, yellow

— —and aubergine applied direct to the biscuit is not common on

Ch'ien Lung porcelain, but when used it displays the character-
istic neatness and finish of the period. I suspect that many of
the trim rice bowls with neatly everted mouth rim and dragon
designs etched in outline and filled in with aubergine in a green
ground, yellow in an aubergine, or the other combinations of
the three colours, belong to this reign, in spite of the K'ang Hsi
mark under the base. At any rate, the body, glaze and form
can be exactly paralleled in other bowls which have a Ch'ien
Lung mark.

This criticism applies equally to a striking group of porcelain

of which Fig. 3 of Plate 124 is an example. It consists of bowls

and dishes, so much alike in decoration that one might suppose
all existing examples to be parts of some large service. The
body is delicately engraved with five-clawed dragons pursuing
pearls, and somewhat inconsequently over these are painted large
and boldly designed flowering sprays (rose, peony, etc.) or fruiting

pomegranate branches with black outlines filled in ^vith fine, trans-
parent aubergine, full yellow and green in light and dark shades.
The remaining ground space is coated with the thin greenish
wash Avhich does duty for white in this colour scheme, but in
these particular pieces it is unusually lustrous and iridescent.

In fact, on the back of a dish in the British Museum it has

developed patches of golden lustre of quite a metallic appearance
and similar to those noted on the sulphur yellow monochrome
described on p. 239. This lustrous appearance, however, is
probably no more than an exaggerated iridescence, for there is
no reason to suppose that the Chinese ever used metallic lustre

1 See p. 140.

11— 2 F