Page 429 - Chinese pottery and porcelain : an account of the potter's art in China from primitive times to the present day

European Influences in Ch'ing Dynasty 261

all, this group of decorated Oriental is a very small one, and the
specimens painted in the style of any particular English factory

except Chelsea could be counted on one's fingers. No doubt the

same proceedings were repeated in various parts of the Continent,
and there are certainly specimens decorated in the Meissen style,
and in one piece in the Franks Collection the Meissen mark has
been added.
_ But besides this more or less legitimate treatment of Chinese
porcelain, there is a large group of hideously disfigured wares known

by the expressive name of " clobbered china." On these pieces

Chinese underglaze decoration has been " improved " by the
addition of green, yellow, red, and other enamels and gilding,
which fill up the white spaces between the Chinese painting
and even encroach on the blue designs themselves. This mal-
practice dates from the early years of the eighteenth century, and
we find even choice specimens of K'ang Hsi blue and white among
the victims. Possibly there was a reaction at this time against
the Chinese blue and white with which the Dutch traders had
flooded the country, but it is pitiful to find nowadays a fine vase
or bottle of this ware plastered with meaningless daubs of inferior

colour.

Strange to say, the clobberer became an established institution,
and he was at work in London in the last century, and maybe he
is not yet extinct ; and, stranger still, his wretched handiwork
has been actually taken as a model for decoration in English pot-
teries, even to the ridiculous travesties of Oriental marks which
he often added as the last insult to the porcelain he had defaced.
As a rule, the clobbered decoration occurs on blue and white and
follows more or less the lines of the original, though it is at once
betrayed by its clumsiness and the wretched quality of the enamels
used. Occasionally the clobberer was more ambitious, as on a
bottle in the British Museum decorated with three spirited monsters
in underglaze red. Into this admirably spaced design the clobberer
has inserted graceless trees and three ridiculous figures in classical
dress standing in Jack-the-giant-killer attitudes with brandished
swords over the Chinese creatures. The effect is laughable, but it
was vandal's work to deal in this way with choice K'ang Hsi

porcelain.