Page 262 - The Arts of China, By Michael Sullivan Good Book

family have been suggested as possible candidates for the honour
of having this ware named after them—the most likely being
Lang T'ing-chi who, as governor of Kiangsi from 1705 to 1712,
took an active interest in the kilns at Ching-te-chen. The glaze was
probably applied by spraying and ran down the sides of the vase,
stopping miraculously short of the foot—a degree of control
which was lost in the Ch'ien-lung period and has only recently
been recovered; while a beautiful effect appears around the rim
where the colour has failed to "develop" and the glaze has a pale
greenish tinge. The K'ang-hsi potters also copied the beautiful
white "eggshell" bowls of Yung-lo, their versions being more
flawless than the Ming originals, and made a fine imitation of the
classical Ting ware of the Sung period.
These monochromes appealed chiefly to cultivated taste. Much
more widely appreciated were the underglaze blue and enamelled
wares, for which there was a huge demand both in China and
abroad. Most K'ang-hsi blue and white was produced by the
mass-production methods of which Pere d'Entrecolles gives so
29 J Vase, mri-p'ing. Porcelain with ox-
blood (Lang-yao) glaze. Ch'ing depressing a picture, and as a result has a technical perfection com-
Dynasty, K'ang-hsi period (1662-1722).
bined with dead uniformity only partly redeemed by the colour of
the cobalt itself, which has a vivid, intense luminosity never
equalled before or since. It had a great vogue in Europe in the first
half of the eighteenth century, particularly popular being the
"gingerjars" decorated with blossoming prunus on a blue ground
reticulated with lines suggesting ice cracks. Thereafter it was
largely replaced in favour by the brightly coloured enamelled
wares. Between 1667 and 1670 an imperial edict had been issued
forbidding the use of the K'ang-hsi nien-hao. It is not known how
long the ban remained in force, but there are comparatively few
genuine pieces with the K'ang-hsi mark, and a correspondingly
large number to which the potters added the fictitious marks of
the Ming emperors Hsiian-te and Ch'eng-hua.
The great achievement of the potters working under Ts'ang
Ying-hsiian, however, was in the enamels, of which two kinds
had been developed by the end of the Ming Dynasty: wu-ts 'ai (five
colours) enamelled over the glaze, and san-ts'ai (three colours) ap-
plied directly "on the biscuit." In the K'ang-hsi wu-ts'ai, overglaze
violet-blue replaces the underglaze blue of Wan-li, but the domi-
nating colour is a transparent jewel-like green which led its Euro-
pean admirers in the nineteenth century to christen itfamille verte.
Most of these pieces are vases and bowls, made purely for orna-
ment and decorated with birds or butterflies amid flowering
branches, disposed with an exquisite and subtle sense of balance
which stongly suggests that these designs were inspired by paint-
ings. The revived san-ts'ai enamcl-on-biscuit was used chiefly for
reproductions of archaic bronzes and for figurines of Buddhist
and Taoist divinities, children, birds, and animals. Also enamelled
294 Bottle Porcelain decorated with directly "on the biscuit" is the so-called famille noire, whose poly-
plum blossoms reserved on a ground of
chrome floral decoration is set off against a background of a rich
underglue blue. Ch'ing Dynasty,
K'ang-hsi period. black made almost iridescent by being washed over with a trans-