T'ang and Sung.
Early Chinese Pottery and Porcelain. By Basil Gray. (Faber. 30s.) MR. GRAY'S book is the latest addition to a growing list of Faber monographs on pottery and porcelain, of which sixteen have now been published, with others in preparation. The great appeal of these books, of course, lies in their illustrations. Indeed, unless a critic belongs to the "exclamatory" school—which Mr. Gray happily does not—or unless he begins at the beginning and tells the story slowly and painstakingly—for which he has not here the space— there is very little that can actually be said about the pots of a parti- cular period or culture likely to make sense to readers with no previous knowledge. For anyone who seriously intends to learn about pre-Ming Chinese pottery, therefore, I suggest he reads this book in conjunction with Hobson's British Museum handbook, Guide to the Pottery and Porcelain of the Far East, 1937, and Honey's Ceramic Art of China, 1945, cross-checking by means of Gray's frequent references to these two works. T'ang and Sung are two highly distinctive periods in Chinese history. The former, at one time the most powerful dynasty and Empire of its day, is virile, acquisitive and extrovert in temper; the mood of the latter, harrowed by foreign aggression, is conservative, self-conscious and withdrawn. This difference in Zeitgeist makes itself felt in the forms of T'ang and Sung pottery. T'ang pots are bursting with life. Their shapes seem to threaten to explode ; their decoration is as gay and colourful—and as perfectly disciplined—as a military parade. Their varied forms provide abundant evidence of contact with Western Asia, vessel-types and decorative motives being lifted wholesale from the world of Hellenistic art and boldly adapted into a purely Chinese order. The full and calm stream of Sung ceramics, by contrast, betrays no hint of this assertive spirit. Shapes are, as Honey remarks, quiet and contemplative; and decoration is not a distinct quality, but is blended with shape into what Bachofer calls-" a perfect and indivisible unity." Congruent with this division of his main subject, Mr. Gray examines T'ang pottery chiefly from the point of view of the foreign influences it manifests, while for the Sung he presents new light on the identification of the high-born classical porcelains. His essay, in fact, carries the study of Chinese pottery a stage further away from the "connoisseur" phase with which it began in Europe, and which to some extent it has always suffered from, into the field of legitimate art-history. The ninety-six pages of half-tone plates, featuring 113 pots, are really superb. Subjects are intelligently chosen and most attractively photographed. And the four colour-plates, especially one showing a cup-stand with "duck-egg" blue glaze belonging to Sir Harry Garner, are better than any 1 can remember having seen. On page 29 the footnote should refer to plate 63, and on page 39 to plate 87b. WILLIAM Y. WILLETTS.
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