Page 17 - Mounted Oriental Porcelain, The Getty Museum

FIGURE 2. Bottle-shaped vase of white Chinese porcelain of the FIGURE 3. Detail of the frontispiece of John Britton's Graphical and
Yuan dynasty. This is the same porcelain object as that shown in Literary Illustration of Fonthill Abbey, Wiltshire (1823), showing the
Figure 3 but now stripped of its mounts. Note the hole pierced in the Gaignieres-Beckford mounted ewer displayed in a niche of Gothic
body (one of several) for the attachment of the missing mounts. design at Fonthill.
Dublin, National Museum of Ireland. Photo: Courtesy of National
Museum of Ireland.

A piece of the rare Yuan period ware mentioned Roger de Gaignieres, a famous archeologue and its for-
in the inventory of the due de Berry is the most impor- mer owner, and an engraving (fig. 3), published in 1823,
tant example of the practice of mounting Chinese porce- when it was in the possession of the equally famous
lain to survive from this period. This is the so-called English collector William Beckford at Fonthill Abbey
Gaignieres-Beckford ewer, a white porcelain pear-shaped in Wiltshire. 20
bottle made at Jingdezhen early in the fourteenth cen- The earliest piece of Far Eastern porcelain to survive
tury and converted into a handled ewer of European intact with its European mounts is a celadon bowl of
design by means of silver-gilt mounts that were partly the Sung period mounted with silver-gilt as a covered
enameled, like the due d'Anjou's escuelle mentioned cup, which is today in the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen
above, with the armorial bearings of a former owner. at Kassel (fig. 4). The bowl is known to have been
The mounts are by inference probably of Hungarian ori- brought back from the Far East by Count Philip von
gin, for the piece was presented by Louis the Great of Katzenellenbogen, who traveled in the Orient between
J
Hungary to Charles in of Durazzo on the occasion of the 1433 an d 444- The armorial bearings on the mounts
latter's succession to the throne of Naples in 13 81. Today make it certain that these were applied to the bowl no
the vase alone may be seen in the National Museum of later than I453. 21
Ireland 19 (fig. 2); unhappily, it has been deprived of its With the opening up of sea communications be-
mounts, which were certainly in position as late as 1844. tween Europe and the Far East in the sixteenth century,
The appearance of these mounts, however, is familiar Chinese porcelain became a good deal less of a rarity.
from two sources: a detailed drawing made in 1793 for Japanese porcelain, however, did not begin to arrive in

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