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modern idea of “Chinese art.” In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,

Bushell’s study, Oriental Ceramic Art, among his other writings, became a major source for

scholars in Republican China, Europe, and the United States who were developing

twentieth-century studies on ceramics and the various disciplines of Chinese art history.

Bushell’s Oriental Ceramic Art was already part of a gamut of scholarly publications

sponsored and distributed through such institutions as the Royal Academy of Arts in

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London and art historical departments based at Beijing University. In ten oversized
volumes comprising twenty-seven chapters, it covered ceramics from China, Japan, and

Korea, including their history, manufacture, designs, uses, and symbolic meanings in

decoration through successive dynasties (Figure 3).

The most significant research feature of the book that differentiated it from

previous publications was the enormous array of primary text translated from local

gazetteers, official histories, and imperial decrees. It included a luxurious inventory of

the American collector William Walters’ personal holdings of porcelain and was

accompanied by 116 extravagantly produced full-page color plates and more than four

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hundred smaller-sized, black-and-white photographs (Figure 4 and 5). The preface,
written by William Laffan, also praised Bushell for his significant experience dealing

with Chinese-language texts and with objects as well. Laffan, owner of the New York

based newspaper the Sun and member of various subcommittees at the Metropolitan

Museum of Art in New York, contrasted Bushell’s Oriental Ceramic Art with an earlier

Western language translation of Jingdezhen Tao lu by drawing a distinction between

Chinese texts and porcelain objects: “The difficulty was with the Chinese text – the Julien

[the French sinologist] was an excellent sinologist, but was not familiar with the objects