Page 57 - J. P Morgan Collection of Chinese Art and Porcelain

HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION

with ornamental bands worked in relief, covered with
a lustrous green glaze derived from copper persilicate.
The paste is buff-colored, 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 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 from age. The archaic
vases of this class are universally attributed by na-

tive connoisseurs to the Han dynasty. They are

occasionally dated, as in the case of a characteristic

specimen formerly in the Dana Collection at New York,

which was engraved with a date corresponding to b. c.
133, the second year of the period Yuan Kuang.

This early green enamelled ware is not porcelain,
as its body lacks the two essential qualities of white-
ness and translucency. It is chiefly interesting as
giving a fixed point for the study of the subsequent

evolution of the ceramic art in China. On the one

hand, a gradual progress in the selection of materials
and in the perfection of methods of manufacture, where
kaolin was available, culminated in the invention of

porcelain. On the other hand, where colored clays

only were mined evolution was restricted to refine-
ment of the paste, improvement of technique, the in-
troduction of new methods of decoration, such as
colored enamels of new tints, and the like. The

Han dynasty vessels have been mostly dug up in the
neighborhood of Peking, and were probably made not

far away, so that their recent representatives would

be the imposing jars Nos. 896,909, Cases XXXVI,
XXXVII, which were doubtless fashioned in the Liu-li

Ch'ang factory at Peking in the Ming dynasty.

PORCELAIN

Porcelain has been broadly defined as the generic

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