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In the twentieth century, the two overlapping worlds of Chinese art scholarship

and collecting have all agreed that David’s collection of ceramics and his public efforts to

promote Chinese art were a benchmark in the institutionalization of Chinese ceramics as

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a field of study and knowledge. Today, the David collection includes over 1700 objects

in total and its fame predicates itself on Percival David’s own reputation in art circles –

an international one – as a Chinese connoisseur.

However influential and knowledgeable a ceramics and Chinese art specialist

David was, his statement regarding porcelain illustrations was inaccurate. Percival David,

whose ambitions included building a public understanding of “Chinese” ceramic objects,

was “looking” for pictures of ceramic objects portraying “technical peculiarities of

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execution of the objects.” However, contrary to his over-generalized erasure of a

history of ceramic illustrations, visual images germane to the topic of porcelain and

ceramics produced in China have been recovered out of the dustbins of “antiquity,” to use

David’s own word. David was familiar with the authoritative British translator and

collector Stephen Bushell’s foundational works on “Oriental” porcelain and was writing

at a time when translations and reprints of the early nineteenth- century illustrated book,

Jingdezhen Tao lu abounded widely in China and in Britain, to name only two exemplary

countries. In light of his purposeful neglect of the myriad of published visual images, it

is clear that he spoke from the perspective of a collector who had in mind a preconceived

notion of what he considered to be accurate visual representation of porcelain objects.

He desired reference material that presented porcelain as art objects of a singular,

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collectible nature. His agenda thus rendered other visual depictions of porcelain

irrelevant and allowed him to make a simplified and altogether erroneous statement.