Page 51 - Chinese pottery and porcelain : an account of the potter's art in China from primitive times to the present day

D

Hsuan Te (1426-1435) 17

examples of these bowls will be discussed later. They are charac-
terised by a convexity in the centre which cannot be shown in

reproductions.

The secret decoration {an Inia) consists of designs faintly traced
usually with a sharp-pointed instrument in the body and under
the glaze. There is an excellent example of this in a high-footed
cup in the Franks Collection which has the Hsiian Te mark, the
usual faintly greenish glaze, beneath which is a delicately etched
lotus scroll so fine that it might easily be overlooked and is quite
impossible to reproduce by photographic methods. It is, no doubt,
an early eighteenth-century copy of Hsiian ware.

The one exception mentioned above is the type represented
by the " barrel-shaped seats." The description of these leaves
no room for doubt that they belonged to a fairly familiar class
of Ming ware, whose strength and solidity has preserved it in con-
siderable quantity where the more delicate porcelains have dis-
appeared. Plate 62 gives a good idea of the Ming barrel-shaped
garden seat, " with solid ground filled in with colours in engraved
floral designs." The other kind, " with openwork ground, the
designs filled in with colours {wu ts'ai), gorgeous as cloud brocades,"
must have been in the style of Plate 61. These styles of decora-
tion are more familiar to us on potiche-shaped wine jars and high-
shouldered vases than on garden seats, but the type is one and
the same. Quite a series of these vessels was exhibited at the
Burlington Fine Arts Club in 1910, and they are fully described in
the catalogue. Some had an outer casing in openwork ; others had
the designs outlined in raised threads of clay, which contained
the colours like the ribbons of cloisonne enamel ^ ; in others, again,
the patterns were incised with a point. The common feature of
all of them was that the details of the pattern were defined by
some emphatic method of outlining which served at the same time
to limit the flow of the colours. The colours themselves consist
of glazes containing a considerable proportion of lead, and tinted
in the usual fashion with metallic oxides. They include a deep
violet blue (sometimes varying to black or brown), leaf green, tur-

* On the parallelism between this tj-pe of porcelain decoration and cloisonne
enamel, see Burlington Magazine, September, 1912, p. 320. It is worthy of note that
missing parts of these vases, such as neck rim or handles, are often replaced by cloisonne
enamel on metal, which is so like the surrounding porcelain that the repairs are often

overlooked.

—II