Page 219 - Chinese and japanese porcelain silk and lacquer Canepa

Earth a long time’. Peter Mundy published a manuscript between 1634 and 1637,
564
explaining that porcelain pieces ‘should ly 100 yeares undergrounde before they come
to perfection…..’. Later English publications, like Thomas Browne’s Pseudodoxia
565
Epidemica of 1646, continued to include accounts of how to make porcelain.
566
Archaeological evidence of porcelain from English cities
Material evidence of the import of porcelain into England in the early to mid-seventeenth
century is provided by a few archaeological finds in London. Cesspit excavations
that took place between February and May of the year 2000 in the yards behind the
remains of timber houses of a site at 43–53 Narrow Street in the East London suburb
564 Kerr and Wood, 2004, p. 742. Mentioned in Pierson,
2005, p. 34. of Limehouse, yielded a small amount of porcelain along other imported ceramic
565 Jane Hwang Degenhardt, ‘Cracking the Mysteries
567
of “China”: China (ware) in the Early Modern material. This area, first used for domestic occupation in the last two decades of the
Imagination’, Studies in Philology, Vol. 110, No. 1, sixteenth century, was inhabited by seafaring families that until the 1620s were involved
Winter 2013, p. 156.
566 For a full citation, see Adrian Hsia (ed.), The Vision in privateering expeditions against the Spanish, especially in the Caribbean. As
568
of China in the English Literature of the Seventeenth
and Eighteenth Centuries, Hong Kong, 1998, p. 41. Killock and Medders have noted, some commanders of the EIC lived in the emerging
Fig. 3.2.2.15 Blue-and-white jar with a woven 567 t is important to mention that the material
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cane casing from the Tradescant Collection recovered from rubbish pits of Phase VI, containing merchant community of the Ratcliff waterfront and many of the mariners recruited by
Jingdezhen kilns, Jiangxi province ceramics imported from 1580 to 1630, do not the Company at Ratcliffe, Limehouse and the neighbouring areas, served as privateer
Ming dynasty, Wanli reign (1573–1620), c.1600 include porcelain. For more information on this
569
Height: 23.5cm archaeological site and sketch-drawings of some captains against both Spanish and Portuguese ships. Thus it could be assumed that
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford porcelain finds, see Douglas Killock and Frank the seafaring families who inhabited the houses in Narrow Street acquired at least
Medders, ‘Pottery as plunder: a 17th-century
(inv. no. AN1685 B.687.b Jar) maritime site in Limehouse, London’, The Society some of porcelain through plunder. Both Jingdezhen and Zhangzhou porcelain were
of Post-Medieval Archaeology, Vol. 39, Issue 1
570
(2005), pp. 1–91. Mentioned in David Gaimster, found in four cesspits of Phase VII, dating to c.1640–1660. The excavation of Pit
‘Arqueology of an Age of Print? Everyday Objects in 912, located to the north of building IV, yielded two porcelain dishes, one of them
an Age of Transition’, in Tara Hamling and Catherine
probably written in 1603 or 1604. When his character Pompey states that ‘they are Richardson (eds.), Everyday Objects: Medieval and Zhangzhou, which constitute 5.14 percent of the total assemblage excavated. Pit
571
Early Modern Material Culture and its Meanings,
not China dishes, but very good dishes’, he is implying that the dishes used commonly Farnham, 2010, p. 142. 480, yielded two Kraak dishes with panelled rim borders. The fragment of another
at the table were considered to be of inferior quality than those of porcelain. The 568 Killock and Medders, 2005, p. 34. dish from this latter cesspit, crudely decorated with two deer in a landscape within a
557
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569 bid., p. 30.
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next reference appears in Ben Jonson’s recently discovered masque, Entertainment at 570 bid., pp. 35–48. The fact that cesspits of c.1650– panelled peach spray border, and a similar fragment excavated from Pitt 384, relate
1660, c.1660–1670 and c.1680–1700, and a timber-
Britain’s Burse, a performance that took place in London in April 1609 on the occasion lined pit of c.1670–1680 at this site also yielded to finds from the Hatcher junk (c.1643). Pit 214, associated with the property of
572
of the opening of the Earl of Salisbury’s New Exchange, located adjacent to Salisbury Kraak and Zhangzhou porcelain demonstrate that Captain Thomas Harrison, yielded a fragment of a Kraak dish with deer in a landscape
these two types of late Ming export porcelain
House in the Strand, which was hoped would ‘rival Greshman’s Royal Exchange in continued to be used in England during the second within a white cavetto and continuous rim border as well as a few Zhangzhou shards,
half of the seventeenth century. These latter finds
the City’. Jonson claims that there was a profusion of manufactured luxury goods are out of the scope of this study. but they constitute only 0.54 percent of the assemblage. Pit 307 with a context
573
558
on display. As Baker has noted, the ‘Shop-Boy’ character offers for sale a variety of 571 Killock and Medders, 2005, pp. 11 and 51. dating to c.1650–1660, yielded the base of a small Kraak bowl (Fig. 3.2.2.16) and
559
572 bid., p. 44. For a sketch-drawing of the Kraak dish,
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exotic goods from China, describing them to his audience as ‘Veary fine China stuffes, see p. 45, fig. 27:22. Pit 913, dating to c.1660–1670, yielded a fragment of a Zhangzhou saucer dish
573 n 1655, Captain Thomas Harrison took over the
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of all kindes and qualities’. They include ‘China Chaynes, China Braceletts, China Noah’s Ark Inn, located in the south-east corner (Fig. 3.2.2.17), like those recovered from the Spanish shipwreck San Diego (1600), the
scarfes, China fannes, China girdles, China kniues, China boxes, China Cabinetts’. 560 of the excavation area, and the adjacent tenement Wanli shipwreck (c.1625), and the campsite of the Portuguese shipwreck São Gonçalo
from Elizabeth Ellis. Harrison bought another
The ‘Shop-Boy’, as Baker points out, attempts to discredit the porcelain that other adjacent house at the same time, and later acquired (1630) discussed earlier.
574
two other houses to the east of the excavated area.
merchants have for sale in London, saying that there are ‘other China howses about the Killock and Medders, 2005, pp. 12, 29, 39 and 51. A In London, other finds of late sixteenth and early seventeenth century porcelain
town’, to be sure, but what do they offer? ‘Trash’, or counterfeit goods. ‘Not a peece sketch-drawing of the Kraak dish is illustrated as fig. were made during excavations undertaken between September 2000 and April 2001
27:20 in p. 45.
of Purslane about this towne, but is most false and adulterate, except what you see on 574 I am grateful to Chris Jarret, Pre-Construct at Paternoster Square, located immediately to the north of St. Paul’s Cathedral. As
575
Archaeology Ltd, for providing me information and
this shelfe’. Although Robert Cecil was the owner of the new Burse and an investor 557 William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure, Act images of some of the porcelain found at the site. noted by Watson and Pierce, this area of London was known during the later medieval
561
in many of the trading companies trading in the Asian goods promoted by the ‘Shop- 2, scene 1, in Brian Gibbons (ed.), Measure for 575 Sadie Watson and Jacqueline Pierce, ‘Taverns period for the high end of the cloth trade (silk, lace and other quality materials) and
Measure, Cambridge and New York, 1991, p. 103.
and other entertainments in the City of London?
Boy’, Jonson’s commentary saying that they ‘thinke to haue’ the same goods ‘cheape Cited in Pierson, 2007, pp. 27–28. Seventeenth- and 18th-century finds from from the sixteenth century onwards, for publishing houses. The cesspit of Building
576
562
558 The Entertainment was discovered by James excavations at paternoster Square’, Post-Medieval
… at the next returne of the Hollanders fleete from the Indyes’, further indicates Knowles among the State papers Domestic in the Archaeology, Vol. 44, Issue 1 (2010), pp. 172–208. I am 3, yielded fragments of a Kraak plate crudely decorated with mandarin ducks in a
that some of the porcelain that arrived in England at this time was acquired via the Public Record Office. David J. Baker, ‘”The Allegory indebted to Jacqueline Pierce, Museum of London pond within a white cavetto and continuous border (Fig. 3.2.2.18). Shards of two
577
of a China Shop”: Jonson’s Entertainment at Britain’s
Archaeology, for providing me with an image of one
Dutch Republic. Burse’, ELH, vol. 72, No. 1, Spring 2005, p. 159. of the shards excavated at the site and information Kraak klapmutsen with panelled decoration and of two further plates were also found
563
559 Peck, 2005, p. 50. on porcelain finds from the database MOLA, and
Porcelain was still very much unknown in England at this time. By the 1610s, 560 Cited in Baker, 2005, p. 159. to Cath Maloney, archivist, for information on the in the cesspit, which appears to have been in use until the beginning of the eighteenth
LAARC online catalogue.
English writers began describing what they believed about the process of manufacturing 561 Cited in Ibid., p. 173. Baker points out in p. 179, note 576 Watson and Pierce, 2010, p. 174. century. This porcelain, constituting only 4.9 percent of the local and imported
578
50, that ‘Purslane’ is an editorial emendation. The
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porcelain. For instance, according to the philosopher Francis Bacon in his Novum original text reads ‘Pursla’. 577 bid., p. 184, fig. 11. ceramic assemblage, probably belonged to a reasonably well-to-do individual from
562 Baker, 2005, p. 162. 578 Ibid., pp. 181 and 184.
Organum of 1620, porcelain developed from an ‘artificial cement’ when ‘buried in the 563 Cited in Ibid., p. 174. 579 bid., pp. 180, 184–185. London’s rapidly growing professional and middle class. A fragment of a tiny finely
579
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218 Silk, Porcelain and Lacquer Trade in Chinese Porcelain 219