Page 61 - The colours of each piece: production and consumption of Chinese enamelled porcelain, c.1728-c.1780

CHAPTER 1 Introduction

However, as a type of export art, their painters and their potential audiences were

unknown. The question that to what extent these paintings offer reliable evidence is

problematic. Scholars have criticized the reliability of those paintings. Peter Lam has

examined some of the paintings on porcelain manufacture process and he argued that

the part on porcelain producing is not accurate and only was imaged by Chinese

painters. 104 But he also mentioned the part on the trade was actually the case. 105 This

research is aware of the weakness of this approach and sees them as representation to

seek historical information rather than seek historical truth.

Although scant information exists about the artists who painted them, the

paintings themselves are complex coded images which are rich in information about

porcelain production and porcelain trade of the eighteenth century. If we examine

these illustrations carefully, we find that most of the sets have many leaves, ranging

from more than a dozen to as many as fifty. They all consist of four sections: firstly,

the manufacture process in Jingdezhen, which includes the mining and collecting of

raw materials, forming of bodies, painting of under-glaze blue, glazing, firing, second

painting of over-glaze enamels, second firing, packing; secondly, trade with

merchants in Jingdezhen (presumably Canton merchants); thirdly, the transportation

of porcelain from Jingdezhen to Canton; and finally, the sale of goods to foreign

traders.

In addition, details of porcelain shops and displayed samples are carefully

depicted. Scholars have used genre paintings to examine the commerce in local

104 LAM Yip Keung Peter, ‘Porcelain Manufacture Illustrations of the Qing Dynasty’ in Journal of
Guangzhou Museum of Art, 1 Edition, 2004, pp.21-49.
105 Ibid.
45