Page 93 - Collecting and Displaying China's Summer Palace in the West

78 Stacey Pierson
much later date than the original crackle-glazed stonewares of the Song and Yuan
dynasties (twelfth–fourteenth centuries). These were possibly seen by Lawrence-
Archer, but it was a glaze style used continuously thereafter, including on Qing
porcelains, and thus the glaze type, in several colours, became very popular among
collectors as a result of encounters with these objects after 1860. In reports of the
Crystal Palace exhibitions of 1862 and 1865 for example, the term “old gray
crackling” is used but references are also made to “the rarer cracklin of dark, ruby
colour” that may be identified today as Qing dynasty Jun-style ware, of the type that
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would have been found in imperial residences such as the Summer Palace. Examples
outside China can be seen in the collections of the Empress Eugénie’s Musée Chinois,
formed with “gifts” from the Summer Palace (see Chapters 9 and 10). 36 Today, in
the connoisseurship of Chinese ceramics, such later crackled wares are not grouped
together with the earlier examples from the Song and Yuan periods and in the glaze
category in general, they are further separated by body type into stoneware and
porcelain, or ware type such as Guan or Jun. Thus our definition of “crackled ware”
is quite different from that of the Victorians and of course Chinese collectors. 37
To put this in context, it should be noted that monochrome porcelains with
crackled or uncrackled glazes were not the only type to come out of the Summer
Palace, nor were Summer Palace porcelains popular with all collectors and consumers
of Chinese porcelain in Britain. In the 1860s, a fashion for “old blue and white”
developed among artists, writers and those associated with the Aesthetic Movement,
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such as Whistler, Rossetti, Sambourne and Oscar Wilde. This type of blue and white
porcelain was primarily export ware and had first come into Britain a century earlier.
Other collectors tended to favor polychrome-decorated Chinese porcelains such as
famille rose that in fact dominated private and museum collections in the second half

Figure 5.2 Guan ware dish, stoneware with crackled glaze and metal band around rim,
Southern Song dynasty, thirteenth century. PDF A32, Percival David Collection,
British Museum. © SOAS, University of London.