Page 189 - Oriental Series Japan and China, Brinkly

PORCELAIN DECORATED

wood. In Japan or Europe, where the art of re-

pairing porcelain is understood, a very much larger

number of these beautiful objects would have been

preserved in a presentable condition. But the Chi-

nese, curiously enough, never made the smallest prog-

ress in work which a people so appreciative of

porcelain and technically so expert might have been

expected to carry to a high degree of development.

A Chinaman saw* only two methods of dealing

with fractured porcelain : either he cut down the

piece until the injured section had disappeared, and

there remained a truncated vase or a segment of a

pot ; or he bored a row of holes on either side of

the fracture, and into them hammered little clamps

of iron or copper. It was a frank kind of proceed-

ing, but nothing clumsier or more disfiguring can

well be conceived. The result of it "allHaiswtthhaotrnvesr"y
of
few the larger and finer types of

have survived entire, and owing to the great and just

esteem in which such pieces are held by European

and American collectors, as well as to their compara-

tive neglect by Chinese virtuosi, the majority of those

procurable have already gravitated westward, and the

Chinese market is virtually empty. Much of this

applies to the ginger-pots also. They are smaller

than the usual type of sugar-jar, being generally only

ten or eleven inches in height ; their contour is sim-

pler and their lids are flat. As to colour, they stand

neither higher nor lower than the sugar-jars, but

they differ from the latter in the much more fre-

quent tessellation of their surface, and in the more
constant occurrence of the ""
style of
petal-cluster
"
decoration as distinguished from the spray." The

trumpet-necked vases are the least attractive of all,

H3