Page 38 - Chinese Export Porcelain Art, MET MUSEUM 2003

THE AMERICAN TRADE

A rchaeologically excavated shards,
estate inventories, period advertise-
ments, and surviving porcelains with
credible histories provide ample evidence
that Americans enjoyed the spoils of the
China trade as early as the seventeenth and

eighteenth centuries. Toward the end of the
eighteenth century, when the United States
was in direct contact with China, there was
a tremendous influx of Chinese goods.
References to "India China" and "Burnt
China" in early colonial inventories of the
estates of individuals in New York, Boston,
Salem, and Philadelphia are tantalizing
clues to the existence of Chinese porcelains
in those cities. Chinese export porcelain
was mentioned in an American context as
early as about 1622, in an English publica-
tion reporting on English travelers to the
Potomac River; the late-seventeenth-
century will of a member of a New York 39. Plate. Chinese (American market), ca. I750-55. Hard paste. W. 8 /2 in.
family lists "2 East India floure potts white"; (21.6 cm). Gift of the Wunsch Americana Foundation Inc., I977 (I977.257.2)
and an estate appraisal dating to the sec-
a
coat arms embellishes this
Samuel Vaughan's of plate, originally part of larger
ond quarter of the eighteenth century cites
which was small
service. The design is based on an engraved bookplate, enough to
"6 Burnt China Cordials." The scanty infor-
whose wife was a
have been easily shipped to China to be replicated. Vaughan,
mation gleaned from such documentary
Hallowell Boston and Maine, came to Americafrom England and spent time
of
sources is supplemented by the archaeo- in Philadelphia, where he was a chiefplanner of Philosophical Hall, home of the
logical evidence that small cups and dishes American Philosophical Society, one the nation'sfirst learned societies.
of
in underglaze blue and white, in particular,
were used by some American urban coastal
households during the seventeenth century. sites along the James, Chesapeake, and
Beginning in the 1620s such porcelains Hudson Rivers are mostly utilitarian Dutch-
made their way to the United States from market blue and white wares.
ships of the Dutch East India Company, or During the eighteenth century, when
VOC, that sailed American waters, exchang- maritime trade thrived out of the colonies'
ing goods for tobacco. Fragments unearthed major ports of Boston, New York, and
from excavations of seventeenth-century Philadelphia, Chinese porcelains were more

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