Page 97 - Chinese pottery and porcelain : an account of the potter's art in China from primitive times to the present day

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The T'ang Dynasty, 618-906 a.d. 33

looks like a piece of late Persian embroidery. And is not the art

of the T'ang painters essentially modern in the directness of its

appeal ?

The truth is, our knowledge of T'ang pottery has only just
begun, and now that the ware is esteemed in Europe at its proper
worth, the choicer specimens which have been treasured in China
are finding their way westward. Every fresh arrival tells us some-
thing new and surprising, and it only wanted such a piece as Fig. 1,
Plate 10, to establish the identity of the specimens whose T'ang
origin we had before only ventured to conjecture. Here we have
a form of dish which is found among the tomb wares of the T'ang
period, made of the typical T'ang white body and finished in char-
acteristic fashion and decorated with engraved designs of the most
advanced type, filled in with coloured glazes, in addition to bands
of mottling in green and white, and yellow and white. There are,
besides, other specimens of similar make but with simpler, though
scarcely less interesting, design of a mhror-shaped panel formed

of radiating lotus leaves engraved in the centre with a stork in

white and green, all in a deep violet blue ground. The coloured
glazes used in the T'ang polychrome pottery are light and trans-
lucent lead glazes of the kind which reappears on the Ming and
Ch'ing pottery and porcelain, and, as on the later wares, they
are covered with minute accidental crackle. In their splashed
and mottled varieties they have, as already noted, a resemblance
to the glazes of the eighteenth-century Whieldon ware of Stafford-
shire, and it is interesting to note that the T'ang potters also used

another form of decoration which was much fancied in Stafford-

shire about a thousand years later. This is the marbling of the
ware, not merely by mottling the glaze as in Fig. 2 of Plate 9,

or by marbling the surface, but by blending dark and light clays
in the body as in the " solid agate " ware of Staffordshire. It only
remains to prove that painting with a brush was practised by the
T'ang potters, and though one is loath to accept such a revolutionary
idea without positive proof, there is very good reason to think

that such pieces 1 as Fig. 3, Plate 12, belong to the T'ang period.

They have a white pottery body, painted in bold floral scroll

^ Mr. C. L. Freer has in his collection in Detroit a vase of hard reddish ware with a
freely drawn lotus design in brown under a pale green glaze, with parts of the flower
in dry reddish brown slip or pigment over the glaze. It has the characteristic T'ang
base and appears to belong to that period.

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