Page 50 - Chinese Art, Vol II By Stephen W. Bushell

S CHINESE ART.

Not the least interesting of these relics are shields and trophies
of European designs, and classical statuettes from the fountains of
the Italian palace built at Yuan Ming Yuan for the emperor Ch'ien
Lung under the superintendence of the Jesuit missionaries ; all
made at the time in the encaustic tile works near Peking.
The date of the introduction of glaze into the Chinese ceramic
field is unknown, although it would appear to be earlier than that of
the use of glass by them as an independent fabric for vessels. There
is a class of faience vessels of archaic form, moulded generally after
bronze designs, invested with a lustrous dark green glaze derived
from copper persilicate, which is universally attributed by native
connoisseurs to the Han dynasty (b.c. 206-A.D. 220). The paste
is buff coloured, or of darker shades of yellow and red, and is hardly
to be scratched by the point of a knife ; the glaze, approaching
in tint that of the rind of a cucumber, or the leaf of a camellia,
mottled over with darker clouds, is of finely-crackled texture, and
often becomes strongly iridescent with age. A bottle-shaped
vase of this class of dark reddish stoneware, modelled in the shape
of a bronze ritual vessel of the time, and enamelled with a dark
green iridescent glaze, much exfoliated, formerly in the Dana
Collection at New York, was engraved with a date corresponding
to B.C. 133, the second year of the period Yuan Kuang. A similar
vase in the British Museum, although it has no inscription, evi-
dently dates from about the same time. A striking example,
illustrated in Fig. 2, comes from the collection of the celebrated
antiquary Liu Hsi-hai, styled Yen-t'ing. The decoration, worked
in the paste in a band three inches wide spreading i^ound the shoulder
of the vase, is composed of mythological figures in the style of
the stone sculpture of the Han dynasty illustrated in Vol. L Here
we see figures riding upon dragons, with drawn bows in their hands,
pursuing tigers, the scene beini filled in with the usual grotesque
surroundings, while the band is interrupted on either side by a
monster's head supporting a ring, simulating a handle of tlic vase.