Oriental Pottery and Porcelain
The George Eumorfopoulos Collection. Catalogue of the Chinese, Corean and Persian Pottery and Porcelain. By R. L. Hobson. Vol. VI. (Ernest Henn. £12 I2s.) This Volume brings to an end.Mr. Hobson's monumental work on the Oriental pottery in the EtunorfoPoulos Collection. In it _are gathered histly. Chineie wares, of various categories, acquired by Mr. Eumorfopoulos since the publication of the preceding volumes in which otherwise they would hive found a place. Amongst these supplementary specimens are several of great beauty and some of great interest to the expert. The latter include two convex moulds with deeply incised ornament used for producing bowls with relief designs of the kind familiar among celadon and Ting wares of the Sung period ; one of these moulds, bearing an inscription of date (equivalent to 1203 A.D.), is a useful landmark for chronological sorting. Fresh evidence is provided of the wonderfully high average of skill in modelling of the purveyors of funeral figures in the Wei and T'ang periods ; European modellers of to-day would deserve to feel proud if they could produce with ease works of such power as a duck, a tumbler turning a somersault, and certain long-legged horses here shown, for all that the last- named irresistibly arouse a smile by their likeness to Tenniel's Rocking-horse-fly of Looking-glass fame.
A -second section of the volume is devoted to miscellaneous Chinese stonewares and earthenwares. Two types will here specially interest the ordinary collector. One of these is the Canton stoneware with opalescent glazes, generally dark broWn with lavender-blue markings, which are purchasable at-quite moderate prices and have as a rule undeniable dignity of form and attractiveness of colouring, although groundless claims of an early date, often made on their behalf, are apt to discredit them in the eyes of the collector. The second well-known type is that of the red wares from the Shanghai district. These must in Queen Anne's time have been among - the. most familiar of all Chinese wares in England, for in the form" of small teapots they were regularly imported with tea arid- sold by dealers in that ingredient of a beverage then newly .fashi— onable. - _ _ . But to the lay reader the chief delights of this volume* will be found in the later sections, amongst the illustrations, rendering with unsurpassed faithfulness to the originals the Corean and Islamiewares. There is perhaps in the collection no example that does full justice to the great distinction of form which the unglazed pottery of the earliest Corean period --that of the Sills domination—is capable of attaining ; but the wares of the succeeding Koryu Dynasty are seen in the fulness of their beauty. Here. for the _first time in a European work an attempt has been made to rangt the Koryu wares by periods, based on the recent investigations of a Japanese authority, and it is shoWn that the earliest among them, belonging to the eleventh and twelfth centuries, include those celadon pieces with bird or flower designi engraved with the utmost sensitiveness of hand under a glaze of the blue of sea- water when looked down into from above beneath a clear spring sky. In these, but not less in the vigorous painted wares of coarser finish belonging to the later Koryu times, we find the masked individual character by which Corean pottery in all its phases is distinguished from that of the great neighbour kingdOms.
When we turn to the Islamic pottery we are in a different world, a world much nearer to our own. The leading role is here played by Persia, and the art exhibited by Persian pottery, from the earlier vigorous sgraffito wares, for which the term Gabri or " Fire-worshippers' " ware has been too readily taken over from the jargon of Levantine dealers, to the refined miniature-painted and lustred wares of the thir- teenth century, is essentially, in spite of all borrowed strains, an art of the North, akin to the Gothic art of Europe. To this fact doubtless is due the sympathy with which we approach it. No predisposition is needed, however, for the aesthetic appreciation of wares which, as Mr. Hobson justly claims, are not surpassed by the Chinese in " instinctive sense of colour and command of intricate design." These merits are plain to see in the specimens which bring to a conclusion the illustrations of this sumptuous catalogue of the finest collection of Asiatic pottery ever brought together in Europe.
BERNARD BACHITAM.
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