Page 43 - Chinese Porcelain Vol I, Galland

DRAWING AND PAINTING.
15

DBAWING AND PAINTING.

One under which the ceramic artists laboured,
great difficulty
is to be found in the of division of labour
perhaps system
adopted at King-te-chin, which seems to have extended to
the of the
painting pieces, the artists and artificers apparently
treated like the
being ordinary labourers, and this method was
probably also pursued at the less celebrated manufactories.
"
Pere d'Entrecolles writes : One workman has the sole
office of forming the first coloured circle we see round the
edges of po-rcelain ; another traces the flowers, which a third
colours ; this artist paints the water and the mountains, and
the birds and other animals. As Jacquernart says, ' With such
methods all There are no
individuality disappears. longer
painters, not even a school of painters ; it is, as it were, a series
of generations, working after a stereotyped hereditary pattern
— the workshop in its most material form.' "
No doubt the mandarins in found this
charge by system
the of the turned out was best main-
average quality porcelain
tained, and to a nation objecting to change in any shape, the
crushing out of all individuality was not perhaps a matter of
much New and we have seen, were
regret. shapes patterns,
wanted for the and rolled
palace by Europeans ; and, as years
on, new styles came into existence, such changes being chiefly
the result of intercourse with The routine work,
foreigners.
however, went on at King-te-chin without much alteration,
and when we come across an fine the
exceptionally piece,
probability is that it had been some special order, in the
execution of which the mandarins in charge employed their
best workmen.
Chinese and could order what liked
foreigners they ; their
commissions were executed, and if found to be in
perhaps,
demand and profitable, their subjects and designs were adopted
as stock in addition to the
patterns eight immortals, the god
of longevity, and the innumerable floral, diaper, and symbolical
designs which, in the absence of particular orders, they went
on turning out to meet the everyday demand of Chinese and