Page 302 - Chinese pottery and porcelain : an account of the potter's art in China from primitive times to the present day

i68 Chinese Pottery and Porcelain

being the seals used by two potters, apparently brothers, named

Ko Ming-hsiang and Ko Yiian-hsiang (see p. 221). It was formerly

said that they lived at the end of the Ming period, but Dr. Bushell

in his Chinese Art^ reduced their antiquity to the reign of Ch'ien

Lung (1736-1795). No reason is given for either of these dates,

but their work is familiar, and as some of the examples have a

decidedly modern aspect, I am strongly in favour of the later attri-

bution. Plate 47 is a fine example of a Kuangtung glaze, in which

the blue is conspicuous.- It is probably of seventeenth-century

date.

Another Kuangtung group consists chiefly of figures and objects
modelled in the round and coated with rich crimson red fiambe
or pea green celadon glazes, with a liberal display of dark brown

or red biscuit. Figures of the god of War and other deities

are often represented, the draperies heavily glazed and the
flesh parts in unglazed biscuit, which sometimes has the appear-
ance of being browned by a dressing of ferruginous clay. (See

Plate 48.)

Brinkley^ describes several additional types of Kuang yao,

including a buff stoneware with " creamy crackled glaze of t'u
Ting type." "* " The characteristic tj^pe is a large vase or ewer^
decorated with a scroll of lotus or peony in high rehef and having
paint-like, creamy glaze of varying lustre and uneven thickness,
its buff colour often showing tinges of blue." Vases of similar

make seem also to aim at copying the red-splashed lavender glazes

of the Chiin and Yiian wares, and sometimes the colour is very
beautiful, but the glaze has distinctive characteristics (see Plate 48,
Fig. 2). It is opaque, and lacks the translucent and flowing char-
acter of the originals, and the surface has a peculiar sticky lustre,
and something of that silken sheen which distinguishes the Canton

^ Op. cit., vol. ii., p. 15.
* Modern English potters produce flocculent glazes of the Canton tj-pe by means

of zinc, and Mr. Mott, of Doulton's, showed me a specimen illustrating the effect of

zinc which was remarkably like the glaze of Plate 47 both in the blue dappling and
the greenish frosting. Possibly the use of zinc was known to the Kuangtung potters
and gave them their characteristic types of glaze. Other effects resembling the Canton
glazes were produced by Mr. Mott by both zinc and tin in the presence of cobalt and

iron.

^ Japan and China, vol. ix., p. 261.

* See p. 90.

* Such a piece from the British Museum collection is figured in the Burlington

Magazine, January, 1910, p. 218.