Page 445 - Oriental Series Japan and China, Brinkly

CHINESE POTTERY

productions are scarcely inferior, but those of Chan Hu and
Sti Hu must be placed at a long interval. Some class even

above Ta-pin the artist Saio Yuen, surnamed Tang Sin. But
his works are so rare that it is difficult to judge its merits.

Perhaps some of his masterpieces may be brooding over
their misfortunes among the excreta of rats and barnyard
fowls. It is with pots as with men !

The above treatise is marred by the fault of almost

all Eastern works on art subjects : it is little more than

a chronological record. What the reader learns from

it is that nearly all the renowned potters of Ti-hsing

flourished during the last century and a half of the Ming
dynasty ; that the chief points aimed at by them were

elegance and unity of form, delicacy of modelling,

quaint colouring of pate, and caligraphic beauty in
their inscriptions and marks. Probably no potters in

any other part of the world ever attained such mathe-

matical accuracy in shaping the various parts of their
Apieces.
lid moulded in the form of a sixteen-

petalled chrysanthemum, for example, will be found

to fit so accurately that not only does every one of its

sixteen convexities correspond perfectly with any one
of the sixteen concavities in the neck of the pot, but

even the pot itself may be raised by the knob on the lid

without the latter coming off. It is said that the Ti-

hsing pottery furnished models for Bottcher's Saxon

ware, and that it was also copied by the Elers at their

factory in Staffordshire. The pottery of the Elers,

however, was uniformly red. They never produced

any of the curious tints found in Chinese boccaro. It
is evident, however, that some of the beauties which

the latter possessed in Chinese eyes can scarcely be

appreciated by Westerners. This is notably the case

with caligraphic skill. The delicately incised diapers

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