Page 158 - Jindezhen Porcelain Production of the 19th C. by Ellen Huang, Univ. San Diego 2008

3. Picturing Jingdezhen Porcelain in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

In the midst of the critical period of formation of western (especially British)

collections of porcelain as “Chinese art,” one of the world’s most influential collectors of

ceramics from China, Percival David, declared in 1933 that “no illustrated work of

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antiquity that deals with Chinese ceramics has survived to us in any form.” The period

of David’s collecting, publishing, and art exhibition organizing occurred during the 1920s

and 1930s, the years during which collecting Chinese art as art dominated modes of

obtaining Chinese ceramics. Collecting art, as Stacey Pierson former head of the Percival

David collection in London has pointed out, stood in contrast to a long, albeit continuous,

history of British trade of Chinese porcelain as decorative as well as functional objects,

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including interior décor and tea and dining sets. The shift can be described as moving

from porcelain as display or use objects to porcelain as collected art artifacts. Percival

David’s collection of ceramics, became the only museum devoted to Chinese ceramics in

England in 1953. In the 1930s, David was an active member of the Oriental Ceramics

Society, lecturer in Chinese art at the University of London, and an advocate for public

learning about traditional “Chinese connoisseurship,” an endeavor best expressed in his

English translation of a treatise written by a Chinese scholar, Gegu yaolun, entitled by

David as “Chinese Connoisseurship.” The Chinese title of the text, completed in 1388,

did not, of course, mean “Chinese connoisseurship;” a more accurate translation might be

“Investigation on Antiquities.” The English language rendering thus exposes the

preoccupation held by 1930’s English collectors with the notion of authentic “Chinese”

taste as the crucial standard by which collectors should identify and collect art objects.

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