Page 432 - Chinese pottery and porcelain : an account of the potter's art in China from primitive times to the present day

264 Chinese Pottery and Porcelain

besides coffee brown bowls, full yellow bowls, vases with curiously
bubbled glaze of dark liver red, and a coral red jar and cover.
There is also a large bowl with " tiger skin " glaze patched with
yellow, green, aubergine and white. All of these pieces are lacking
in quality and distinction, though I have seen far superior specimens
of lemon yellow monochrome and tea dust glaze.

The enamelled wares are much more attractive, and many of the
rice bowls are prettily decorated in soft colours. The Peking or

medallion bowls, for instance, are little if anything below the
standard of previous reigns, and in addition to the medallions in
engraved enamel grounds of pink, green, grey, etc., outside, the
interior is often painted in underglaze blue. There are tasteful

bowls with white bamboo designs reserved in a ground of coral
red, and there are dishes with blackthorn boughs with pink
blossom in a white ground. The Yung Cheng style of under-
glaze blue outlines with washes of thin transparent enamels was
also affected, but the most characteristic enamelling of the period
is executed in a mixture of transparent and opaque enamels, a
blend of famille verte and famille rose. This colouring, soft and

subdued, but often rather sickly in tone, is frequently seen
on bowls and tea wares with Taoist subjects, such as the Eight

Immortals, the fairy attendants of Hsi Wang Mu in boats, or

the goddess herself on a phoenix passing over the sea to the
tHen fang or cloud-wrapt pavilions of Paradise, preceded by a
stork with a peach of longevity in its beak. The sea is usually
rendered by a conventional wave pattern delicately engraved in
greenish white, and sometimes the ground of the design is washed
with the same thin, lustrous, greenish white, which was remarked
on a group of porcelains described on page 151. The porcelain of
these bowls has a white, if rather chalky, body and a greenish white
glaze of exaggerated oily sheen, and of the minutely bubbled, " muslin-

like " texture which is common to Japanese porcelains. But the
ordinary Tao Kuang wares are of poor material, greyish in tone

and coarser in grain, with the same peculiarities in the texture of
the glaze in an exaggerated degree.

A typical example of the fine Tao Kuang rice bowl with Taoist

design in the Franks Collection, delicately painted in mixed colours,
which recall the Ku-yiieh-hsiian ware of the early Ch'ien Lung
period, has the palace mark, Shen te t'ang,^ in red under the base.

1 See vol. i., p. 220.