Page 20 - J. P Morgan Collection of Chinese Art and Porcelain

PREFACE

In respect to all Chinese porcelain, it may be safely

said that when it has been studied for some time it

Wewill be found to look its age. think that age has

already done something for the pieces of the seventeenth

century. Perhaps it has done very little, but we in-

cline to the belief that some change has been wrought

since they left the kiln two hundred years or more

ago. So, too, with the Ming porcelains. The beauti-

ful blue and white of Chia-ching, 1 522-1 566, and the

succeeding reigns, the true Mussulman blue of tra-

dition, looks older than the like product of K'ang-hsi.

All the five-colored porcelain of the Ming dynasty
looks its age, and all the true Ming pieces, of whatso-

ever description, betray their period to the initiated

eye. The counterfeits of the reign of the great Tartar,
K'ang-hsi, were wonderfully clever, but they do not

look the age ascribed to them. Marvellous, too, are

the counterfeits of our own time, the appalling industry

in China evoked by the high prices, the irresistible
rewards offered in Western markets for the ceramic

treasures of the Orient. The Chinese have always

been counterfeiters; their literature, in respect to
porcelain, is a continuous record of imitation, and the

art is revived in this our own day with astonishing force
and effect, and in a fashion to deceive woefully. Japan
too has embarked in this field, and is manufacturing

antiquities as fast as the markets of the world will ab-

sorb them, not only her own antiquities but those of
China and Corea. It is no new industry, the counter-

feiting of works of art; it is as old as the history of art

itself

The Chinese writers described the potters' work of
their own times with great particularity and no little
enthusiasm. It was as thin as paper, as translucent

and sonorous as vessels of jade, and, in respect of color,

it appeared to have all the characteristics of the por-

celain with which we are familiar. None of it, how-