Page 213 - The colours of each piece: production and consumption of Chinese enamelled porcelain, c.1728-c.1780

CHAPTER 6 A New Context of Porcelain Trade 1760-1770

Figure 6-1 Two porcelain workshops at Canton.

Gouache on paper, H: 53.0 cm, Width: 39.1 cm, early nineteenth century. Photo
Courtesy Peabody Essex Museum E81592

For many years, the answer as to when exactly Canton started to produce

enamelled porcelain remained unclear. Current scholarship believes that around the

3
1730s and 1740s, Canton already established enamelled porcelain workshops. Jörg
believes that Canton established a local porcelain painting workshop (in Canton)

around the late 1740s, because of the number of undecorated porcelains that were

4
delivered to Canton in the 1750s. He further provided textual evidence from a

th
3 Daniel Nadler, China to Order: Focus on the XIX Century and Surveying Polychrome
Porcelain Production during the Qing Dynasty 1644-1908 (Paris: Vio International, 2001), p.50.
Geoffrey A. Godden, Oriental Export Market Porcelain and Its Influence on European Wares
(Granada: London, 1979), p.203.Luisa E.Mengoni and Rose Kerr, Chinese Export Ceramics
(London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 2011), p.59.
4 C. J. A. Jörg, Porcelain and the Dutch China Trade (The Hague: Martinus NIjhoff, 1982), p.126,
and Appendix 11. His evidence is from the imported pieces that in the early 1750s, there was a
sudden increasing quantity of white pieces.
197