BOOKS.
A HISTORY OF PORCELAIN.*
IT is a pleasure to come upon a book at once so authoritative and so readable as Mr. Burton's new history of porcelain. It is beautifully produced, with type and paper of such quality as we seldom see nowadays and with a great number of illus. trations, including many coloured plates, whose printer has reproduced with unexpected success such test pieces as an
early celadon vase, an apple-green K'ang Hsi bowl, and two charming examples of " jewelled " Sevres. The pictures, indeed, will be a liberal education for the amateur collector, who will see from the frontispiece—reproducing an exquisite early statuette of the goddess Kuan-Yin—that the Chinese potter leads the world in technique and in artistic taste. The great merit of Mr. Burton's book lies in its frankness. Here is an experienced potter, who himself has done much to revivify the art in England, passing in review the porcelains made during the past ten centuries in China and other countries, and explaining clearly why some are good and others poor or commonplace. His survey is comprehensive, and includes information about existing factories for which we should look in vain elsewhere. At the same time, it is far from being a mere catalogue, of the kind only too common in ceramic literature, in which each factory is described with uniform dullness. The ordinary reader who is really interested in porcelain or any other artistic production wants a scale of values, and it is precisely this which Mr. Burton gives him. He makes it clear at the outset that " Chinese porcelain towels supreme, defying all rivalry and all but the most worshipful approach." He is not afraid to say, despite all the archaeologists, that
" the work of the Persian potter, whether in his rich-painted faience or in his delicate porcelain, has contributed more appro- priate decorative ideas to his fellow-craftsmen of other races than were ever derived from the study of Greek vases, which, from the rebirth of classicism in Europe about the -middle of the eighteenth century, has weighed like a veritable old man of the sea' on the shoulders of English, French and German potters alike. One is almost tempted to say that one Graeco. Roman vase of glass, the famous Portland or Barberini Vase in the Gem Room of the British Museum, has wrought more evil, in misleading the footsteps of modern European potters, than will be undone in another hundred years, while all along the truly appropriate decorative pottery of the Middle East has been awaiting due recognition and honour."
The pseudo-classic productions of Dresden, or of Sevres under Napoleon, or of Derby, testify to the truth of this drastic judg- ment.
Mr. Burton devotes half of his first volume to a most instruc- tive sketch of the history of Chinese porcelain. It begins in the tenth century with the green ware that the French called celadon after the hero of D'Urfe's Astree, who in the dramatized
version of the novel appeared in a greyish green costume. Just as the red " Samian " ware is found wherever Roman influence penetrated, so celadon of the Sung and Ming dynasties has been unearthed in all parts of the East to which it was brought by Arab traders. Nor did it fail to reach Europe. Archbishop Warham's cup at New College, Oxford, is a celadon bowl, mounted in silver-gilt about the year 1530. For many a col-
lector, these early celadon, with their simple incised decoration and their mysterious charm of colour, still rank among the masterpieces of the Chinese potter. The " transmutation" glazes were invented at an early date, and Te-hua began in the Middle Ages to make its famous white porcelain which long baffled the European craftsmen who sought to imitate it. But, as Mr. Burton points out, the blue-and-white porcelain which we regard as most typical of China, and which Europe has specially favoured for three centuries, was a comparatively late development. Persian and Syrian potters had long used under- glaze blue on their earthenware, but the Chinese did not adopt it much before 1400. The author supplies what is probably the true reason—namely, that China is poor in cobalt ores and had to import good blue pigment from Persian Baluchistan. The
• A General History of Porcelain. By William Burton. 2 vole. London : Candi. [84s. net.]
Chinese spoke of it as "Mohammedan blue," and it is noticeable that, when their supply was cut off late in the fifteenth century, the quality of the blue on the porcelain shows a deterioration. Mr. Burton does not underrate the excellence of much of the later blue and white, but he shows that there is some scientific basis for the preference accorded to the superb Ming blue and white of the early fifteenth century. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, under K'ang Hsi and his successors, the Chinese potters at the great Imperial factory of Ching-to-chen reached the height of technical perfection. They are not to be judged by the ware that they made in vast quantities for export, including porcelain decorated in the Persian manner for Persia, and, for England, dinner services with armorial bearings— some of which are attributed by the ignorant to the small eigh- teenth-century factory at Lowestoft. The triumphs of Ching-te- chen, such as one sees in the Salting collection, were for the Imperial Court and were not exported till the later nineteenth century. It is noteworthy, however, that these master-potters learned something from Europe. Mr. Burton believes that the gay enamel colours which we think of as famine rose were intro- duced by the Jesuit missionaries in the eighteenth century. The Chinese painters knew how to use their enlarged palette on the " egg-shell " china, and the pierced lanterns which, if not the most beautiful, are certainly among the most astonishing things made of baked clay.
Mr. Burton lays stress on the influence exerted by the glassy porcelain of Persia upon the West. In the late sixteenth century a similar glassy porcelain, of sand, china clay, and powdered glass, was made for a few years in Florence. A hundred years later French potters essayed the task with more success—at Rouen, Vincennes, Chantilly, and above all at Sevres. The "soft paste" of Sevres—so called not because it is soft to the touch, but because it had to be fired at a lower temperature than " hard paste " or true porcelain—was most difficult to make, and is inferior, for practical purposes, to Chinese porcelain or to the English modification of it, which is known as " bone-china." But from the artistic standpoint Sevres, in its beet period, is worthy of the French genius. As the author says, our public and private collections contain more of the finest Sevres porcelain, made between 1756 and 1769, than is to be found even in France. The display in the Wallace Collection is, of course, famous and unsurpassed, and even the prejudiced visitor, who has been taught to despise all eighteenth-century art as " rococo," is often con- verted by the sight of these wonderful services and " garnitures " in rose Pompadour and apple-green, modelled and painted and gilt with superb skill. Mr. Burton recalls how he took M. Auscher, then the technical manager at Sevres, to see the Wallace Collection, and how M. Auscher confessed that the more complex pieces of " soft paste " were " miracles of technique which a porcelain-maker of the present day does not profess to under- stand." After 1769, when the Sevres directors found out how to make " hard paste," or true porcelain, the uncertain " soft paste" was gradually abandoned. It had been imitated at Bow and Chelsea, and at .Capo di Monte, and was made at Buen Retire), near Madrid, to a much later date ; but the French " soft paste," and especially that of Sevres, is incomparable. Mr. Burton writes well on the English factories, noting that they were influenced by Japanese rather than Chinese decoration, and does not fail to ridicule the extravagant praise lavished on such minor potters as, for example, Billingsley. Of the Nantgarw ware he says, bluntly and truthfully, that " it is high time that it should be recognized as the ill-starred production of a few men who were neither particularly intelligent nor skilful." He recognizes the high technical merit of the true porcelains of Meissen-Dresden, Berlin, and other eighteenth-century German factories, though he is not blind to their lack of taste. Wo must note also his admirable account of the Copenhagen factory which, especially in recent years, has produced some of the most charm- ing porcelain ever made in Europe, adapting new processes with rare skill and judgment: Hungary's sole porcelain factory is, it seems, devoted to the reproduction of all the famous wares of the East and the West, to the confusion of the unwary collector.
Previous page
