Page 17 - Mounted Oriental Porcelain Getty Museum
P. 17
FIGURE 2. Bottle-shaped vase of white Chinese porcelain of the FIGURE 3. Detail of the frontispiece of John Britton's Graphical and
Yuan dynasty. This is the same porcelain object as that shown in Literary Illustration of Fonthill Abbey, Wiltshire (1823), showing the
Figure 3 but now stripped of its mounts. Note the hole pierced in the Gaignieres-Beckford mounted ewer displayed in a niche of Gothic
body (one of several) for the attachment of the missing mounts. design at Fonthill.
Dublin, National Museum of Ireland. Photo: Courtesy of National
Museum of Ireland.
A piece of the rare Yuan period ware mentioned Roger de Gaignieres, a famous archeologue and its for-
in the inventory of the due de Berry is the most impor- mer owner, and an engraving (fig. 3), published in 1823,
tant example of the practice of mounting Chinese porce- when it was in the possession of the equally famous
lain to survive from this period. This is the so-called English collector William Beckford at Fonthill Abbey
Gaignieres-Beckford ewer, a white porcelain pear-shaped in Wiltshire.20
bottle made at Jingdezhen early in the fourteenth cen-
tury and converted into a handled ewer of European The earliest piece of Far Eastern porcelain to survive
design by means of silver-gilt mounts that were partly intact with its European mounts is a celadon bowl of
enameled, like the due d'Anjou's escuelle mentioned the Sung period mounted with silver-gilt as a covered
above, with the armorial bearings of a former owner. cup, which is today in the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen
The mounts are by inference probably of Hungarian ori- at Kassel (fig. 4). The bowl is known to have been
gin, for the piece was presented by Louis the Great of
Hungary to Charles in of Durazzo on the occasion of the brought back from the Far East by Count Philip von
latter's succession to the throne of Naples in 13 81. Today
the vase alone may be seen in the National Museum of Katzenellenbogen, who traveled in the Orient between
Ireland19 (fig. 2); unhappily, it has been deprived of its 1433 and J444- The armorial bearings on the mounts
mounts, which were certainly in position as late as 1844. make it certain that these were applied to the bowl no
The appearance of these mounts, however, is familiar later than I453.21
from two sources: a detailed drawing made in 1793 for
With the opening up of sea communications be-
tween Europe and the Far East in the sixteenth century,
Chinese porcelain became a good deal less of a rarity.
Japanese porcelain, however, did not begin to arrive in
4 INTRODUCTION
