Page 176 - A Re-examination of Late Qing Dynasty Porcelain, 1850-1920 THESIS

preserved in modern British collections. As outlined, British collectors amassed their

collections quite broadly. As a result, British collectors often procured items that were

considered “undesirable” by a trained Chinese connoisseur. It was due to this perspective

that several British collectors retained porcelain objects from eras that have frequently

been overlooked, underappreciated, and devalued overall. These collections were unique,

because the general trends in porcelain collecting in England did not show interest in the

th
late dynastic era. According to scholars during the mid-20 century, British collectors
predominately attempted to collect Chinese porcelain dating to the Ming dynasty or

earlier. 227 However, it was common for British collectors to acquire Qing porcelain that

they misidentified as earlier Ming ware. 228 A lack of knowledge and scholarship

regarding Chinese porcelain allowed British collectors to unknowingly collect more

broadly than they had intended.

Since the late Qing dynasty was a period that was considered a “decline” in

porcelain, a vast majority of the wares produced were not widely collected or published

within museum collections. As British collectors amassed large volumes of porcelain

over a historically long period of time, they were able to procure examples from the late

Qing period in volumes that are unmatched in other institutions. The quantity held by

British collections allowed this study to conclusively identify the styles associated with

this era. Scholars have frequently ignored the porcelain of late dynastic China. It is

apparent that this it not a current trend, but rather a historically recurring event. An

227 Judith Green, “A New Orientation of Ideas: Collecting and the Taste for Early Chinese
Ceramics in England 1921-1936,” in Collecting Chinese Art: Interpretation and Display, ed.
Stacey Pierson (London: School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, 2000),
43.
228 Stacey Pierson, From Object to Concept: Global Consumption and the Transformation of
Ming Porcelain (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2013), 66.
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