Page 35 - Met Museum Export Porcelain 2003

THE AMERICAN TRADE

A rchaeologically excavated shards, 39. Plate. Chinese (American market), ca. I750-55.Hard paste. W. 8 /2in.
estate inventories, period advertise- (21.6 cm). Gift of the Wunsch Americana Foundation Inc., I977 (I977.257.2)
ments, and surviving porcelains with
SamuelVaughan'csoatof armsembellishesthisplate, originallypart of a larger
credible histories provide ample evidence service.Thedesignis basedon an engravedbookplatew, hichwas small enoughto
that Americans enjoyed the spoils of the have beeneasilyshippedto Chinato bereplicated.Vaughanw, hosewife was a
China trade as early as the seventeenth and Hallowell of Bostonand Maine, cametoAmericafromEngland and spenttime
eighteenth centuries. Toward the end of the in Philadelphia,wherehe was a chiefplannerof PhilosophicaHl all, homeof the
eighteenth century, when the United States AmericanPhilosophicalSociety,oneof thenation'sfirstlearnedsocieties.
was in direct contact with China, there was
a tremendous influx of Chinese goods. sites along the James, Chesapeake, and
Hudson Rivers are mostly utilitarian Dutch-
References to "India China" and "Burnt market blue and white wares.

China" in early colonial inventories of the During the eighteenth century, when
estates of individuals in New York,Boston, maritime trade thrived out of the colonies'
Salem, and Philadelphia are tantalizing major ports of Boston, New York,and
clues to the existence of Chinese porcelains Philadelphia, Chinese porcelains were more
in those cities. Chinese export porcelain
was mentioned in an American context as

early as about 1622, in an English publica-
tion reporting on English travelers to the
Potomac River;the late-seventeenth-
century will of a member of a New York
family lists "2 East India floure potts white";
and an estate appraisal dating to the sec-
ond quarter of the eighteenth century cites
"6 Burnt China Cordials." The scanty infor-
mation gleaned from such documentary
sources is supplemented by the archaeo-
logical evidence that small cups and dishes
in underglaze blue and white, in particular,
were used by some American urban coastal
households during the seventeenth century.
Beginning in the 1620s such porcelains
made their way to the United States from
ships of the Dutch East India Company, or
VOC,that sailed American waters, exchang-
ing goods for tobacco. Fragments unearthed
from excavations of seventeenth-century

37