Page 20 - Mounted Oriental Porcelain Getty Museum
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FIGURE 9. Casket of blue-and-white Chinese porcelain of the Wanli England was by no means the only country to
period with English mounts of silver-gilt,dating from 1570-80. mount Chinese porcelain enthusiastically during this pe-
Photo courtesy of the Royal Ontario Museum, © ROM. riod. In the Museo Civico at Bologna, for example, there
is a Ming bowl with silver-gilt mounts, probably of Por-
sity's most prized treasures. Forty years later, a porcelain tuguese origin26; other examples could be given.27
cup with a grayish-blue glaze came into the possession of
a certain merchant, Samuel Lennard, and was mounted After the founding in 1602 of the highly successful
by him with silver-gilt bearing the London hallmark for Dutch East Indies Company, a great deal of the trade in
1569-70 and the mark of an unidentified silversmith oriental materials of every sort gradually passed from
with the initials FR. Believed to be the earliest fully Portuguese hands into those of Hollanders, and Dutch
marked piece mounted in England (fig. 7), it is known as silversmiths began to practice the technique of mount-
the Lennard cup, from the name of its original owner, and ing porcelain. Dutch mounts were usually a good deal
is today in the collection of the Percival David Founda- simpler and less imaginative than contemporary English
tion of the University of London. A particularly notable designs. A typical bowl would be given a simple rim of
group of blue-and-white porcelains of the Wanli period silver, linked to the plainly molded foot by means of
was mounted in London with silver-gilt for William strapwork of a simple pierced design. A certain number
Cecil, Lord Burghley, Queen Elizabeth's Lord Treasurer; of blue-and-white pieces mounted in this way have sur-
it remained in the possession of his descendants at vived, and more (and usually grander) examples can be
Burghley House until the beginning of the twentieth cen- seen in still lifes by Dutch artists of the period such as
tury. The entire group was purchased by J. P.Morgan and Willem Kalf.28
later acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New
York (fig. 8).25 On New Year's Day 1587, Lord Burghley It is thus clear that by the middle of the seventeenth
presented his sovereign with a bowl of white Chinese century, the setting of oriental porcelain in mounts of
porcelain mounted with gold, a rare reversion to medie- metal of European design was practiced fairly widely.
val practice. An unusual example of mounting is the As early as 1611 oriental goods, including porcelain,
blue-and-white Ming porcelain mounted with silver-gilt began to appear at the popular Poire de Saint-Germain
as a hinged box with a classical figure surmounting the in Paris. Soon after this, a contemporary versifier wrote:
lid, which is in the Lee collection at the Royal Ontario
Museum (fig. 9). The mounts are of English work and Menez-moi chez les Portugais
date from around 1570. Nous y verrons a peu de frais
Les marchandises de la Chine
Nous y verrons Vambre gris
De beaux ouvrages de vernis
Et de la porcelaine fine
De cette contree divine
Ou plutot de ce paradis.29
Paradoxically, the greater accessibility of Chinese,
and later Japanese, porcelain increased rather than di-
minished interest in this exotic material. It was collected
widely. Well before the end of the seventeenth century,
almost every European prince or great nobleman wished
to have his china cabinet, or Porzellanzimmer (as it was
called in German lands where a number of them survive).
In such rooms the walls were entirely decorated with
Chinese and Japanese porcelains displayed on brackets
or overmantels, in cabinets, and along cornices and
shelves, even sometimes on the floor along the base-
boards (fig. 10). At Hampton Court Palace visitors can
still see the remains of such a decorative schemedesigned
by Daniel Marot for Queen Mary n's apartments.30 In
1978-79, just such an arrangement was shown in the
United States when a replica of part of the Porzellanzim-
mer of Augustus the Strong of Saxony was constructed
at the exhibition of works of art from Dresden.31
INTRODUCTION 7
