Page 22 - J. P Morgan Collection of Chinese Art and Porcelain

PREFACE

and he died full of years and ceramic honors at the end

of the first half of the nineteenth century. He is
handed down to posterity as a potter of the greatest dis-

tinction, and one who, in his time, was celebrated far

and wide for the skill with which he imitated the pottery
of others. It is told that the Prince of Arita was so

pleased with his reproduction of a Chinese vase of the

reign of the Emperor Yung-lo, that he forthwith named
him Yung-lo, and presented him with a seal bearing

those characters, with authority to affix it thereafter to

his pieces. Thus it came about that Zengoro-Riosen
was thenceforward known as Yeiraku, the Chinese

characters Yung-lo being pronounced in Japanese,
Yeiraku. The white bowl in the collection. No. 6, case

F, is one of these celebrated objects, and bears in old
k'uan characters, the mark Yung-lo nien chih.

These pieces, and they are relatively few in number,
present the one point of possible or imagined contact
with the earlier porcelain of Chinese literature. The
more robust porcelains of the Ming dynasty identify
themselves readily, and a number of examples are
found in the collection, it will always be apparent
that pieces of Ming porcelain in some sort look their
age. At any rate, they look older in essential par-
ticulars than the porcelains which merely bear Ming
marks, or which for other reasons have always been

erroneously ascribed to a much greater antiquity than

they could rightly claim. In this category were the
black hawthorns, the green hawthorns, the greater
part of all the earlier blue and white collections of
Europe, all the copper-reds, including the sang-de-
boeufs, and practically all the decorated porcelain not
bearing the marks of the present dynasty. Even these
last were long indeterminate, because prior to the mid-
dle of the nineteenth century the marks upon porce-
lain had not been elucidated for general use.

The so-called "hawthorn" porcelains are divided

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