Page 160 - Chinese pottery and porcelain : an account of the potter's art in China from primitive times to the present day

yS Chinese Pottery and Porcelain

has a more capricious origin, deriving from the shepherd Celadon,
a stage personaUty whose familiar grey green clothing suggested

a name for the grey green porcelain. He appeared in one of the

plays founded on the early seventeenth-century romance, VAstree,

written by Honore d'Urfe.

Large dishes and plates, bowls, vases, bulb bowls and jars of this

green ware have found their way to all parts of Europe in considerable

numbers, and they evidently formed a staple of far Eastern trade

in the Middle Ages. The subject of their distribution will be

treated presently. First, we must complete their description.

The ware, as a general rule, has a greyish white mass varying

from porcelain to stoneware, and with the peculiar quality of

assuming a reddish brown tint wherever the glaze is absent and
the " biscuit " was exposed to the fire of the kiln. It has, in fact,
the " iron foot " though not the " brown mouth," for the body

is of a whitish colour under the glaze, and consequently the mouth

of the vessel varies from green to greenish white, according to

the thickness of the glaze. The decoration is either carved, etched

mwith fine point, or raised relief by pressing in an intaglio mould

or by the application of small ornaments separately formed in

moulds. All these processes are applied to the body before the

glaze is added, and the glaze, though covering them over, is trans-

parent enough to allow the details to appear fairly distinctly. In

the case of the applied reliefs, however, the glaze is often locally

omitted, and the ornaments stand out in biscuit, which has assumed

the usual reddish brown tint. This is well illustrated on Plate 21,

in which two brown fishes are represented swimming round a

Asea green dish. dish in the British Museum shows three fishes

swimming beneath the green surface of the glaze. This fish design

was frequent enough to have earned special notice in Chinese books,

which are excessively niggard in their enumeration of designs.

The Ko ku yao lun,'^ for instance, says " there is one kind of dish

on the bottom of which is a pair of fishes, and on the outside are

copper rings attached to lift it."

Elaborate designs of flowers, flying phcenixes in peony scrolls,

dragons in clouds or waves, formed in relief by pressure in moulds,

were certainly used on Sung celadons just as they were in the

white Ting wares, but they seem to have been still more common
on the Ming wares. But the best and most characteristic Sung

* Bk. vii., fol. 24 verso.