An introduction to Ming blue and white porcelain | Curator's Corner S5 Ep6 #CuratorsCorner

hello I'm Jessica Harrison Hall and I'm a specialist in Ming ceramics and welcome to my corner [Music] today I'm going to talk to you about Ming ceramics the Ming Dynasty in China runs from 1368 to 1644 and I have before me a selection of blue and white ceramics that were made in Jing dodging between 1368 and 1644 [Music] this saucy dish was made at the time of the hongwu emperor now he conquered the Mongols and established the Ming Dynasty in 1368 and he has an extraordinary life story at one state he was so poor he had to beg for land to bury his parents and yet by the time he was 40 he was son of heaven and ruling all of China and during his reign supplies of cobalt to make the underglaze blue design was interrupted and so blue and white wears during his reign have a much weaker tone because they use the imported cobalt quite sparingly or mixed it with local cobalt so what we're looking at here is a rather beautiful sorcerer originally it would have had a cup set in the center here and it has a very stiff bracketed edge and this is reminiscent of metalwork we find these dishes made in silver and gold with this same bracket lobed rim and then inside can you see you've got these lotuses that are shown sometimes from above and sometimes in profile and what's particularly clever is you can see that there are some areas where they left white around the petal and that creates a kind of three dimensionality to the flower so each of these flowers have been painted with a very fine brush and you can pick out all the different details and the flower it's really quite exquisite [Music] the second ceramic that we're going to look at was made in the younger period now this is the high point for blue and whitening porcelain he ruled between 1403 to 24 and he was the Emperor that moved the capital from nanjing north to Beijing and he instigated a real change Jing to turn where these porcelains were produced so you get porcelains made with a much finer prepared body clay and more beautiful glaze and you can see if you look closely at the flowers here which are all peonies that the actual blue is used to sculpt the flower so that certain areas that are white certain areas that are pale blue and certain areas that are dark blue and if we look very very closely you can see some which are black where the blue has really come all the way through the glaze so one of the things about younger period early 15th century blue and white porcelain is that you have these sculpted flowers each of the leaves make sense in the pattern and these particular flowers have these crinkle edged leaves and you may be wondering why is it in this shape and that's because again it's copying a metalwork form it's not natural in ceramic to have these little hooks at the top of the handle and you have to imagine originally it would have had a cover and that from the knob on the top of the cover that would have connected a chain to the top of the handle and this struct here is entirely unnecessary for the ceramic but would have helped support the spout in the gold original and when we turn around and look at the base of the handle you've got these three tiny almost like nails these studs which would have fixed the metal handle to the body it's very very beautifully painted and you can see it has a much whiter Glaze surrounding the blue than the whole piece this is probably one of the most precious being ceramics that we have on the table today moving on to a third example this was made in the mid 15th century and what's interesting about this is you start to get fabulous designs from woodblock prints so if we start off on this example we begin with this building here with these typical Chinese roof edges that are upturned at the edge inside you can see a scholar waiting with a bottle of wine and his servant is pointing out to the procession of people who were coming to see him but the first servant is carrying a sword over his shoulder and the second has a musical instrument wrapped in silk called a chin after them come the scholars themselves mounted on horseback with these fabulous black hats that had these wings at the side each one has a rank badge on his chest and their horses are bedecked with fabulous bridles and saddles trimmed with a pom-pom on the nose behind the three scholars we have two more servants one who is bringing a shoulder pole with two picnic baskets attached each of the layers here would have contained different delicacies all contained within stacking lacquer boxes and his friend behind him comes with two wine jars full of delicious wine for their feast and they're followed right at the end with a another servant carrying a stack of books and then the scene comes to an end with these sort of clouds that's how we know it's the beginning in the end of the scene so how are these made they're fashioned from porcelain clay thrown on a wheel and then painted with cobalt oxide in solution which when you painted on appears black after you've let it dry you cover it with a clear glaze and then fire it at a high temperature these are fired in wood fueled kilns that snake up the side of mountains in the southern part of China near the city of Jing dodging and so because of this sneaking form ungulates up the hillside they're referred to as dragon kilns you might be wondering what the jar is full it's effectively a large container for wine so originally it would have had a cover and we see these in paintings sitting on the floor and from this wine would have been taken and then put into smaller vessels like this decanter or bottles [Music] the next item on the table is this box which was made for the long Ching Emperor who really only ruled for five or six years between 15 67 and 72 so this beautiful square box is interesting because it has this pattern of two dragons you can see the heads here and then the curling bodies that run all the way through with the five clawed feet and they're chasing this flaming pearl amongst the clouds and then the edges each edge has got a different dragon around the edge on the four sides and then underneath we've got a box with four compartments again each of the compartments is outlined with a blue line the edges are unglazed and then inside they're filled with glaze and each of the edges has a roundel with a dragon rather like the robes over an emperor these come from textile designs and there are twelve of them around the outside the first piece that we've come across in the selection that has a rain mark and yet we're always talking about mark and period ming porcelain the rain marks themselves are generally made up of six characters sometimes a fool the first to have the name of the dynasty great Ming the second to have the name of the rain period and then the last two are year and made in so it's made in the year of and then the particular Emperor's name blue mic wasn't invented in the Ming Dynasty blue and white goes much further back in time he's history and the first bloom white porcelains were made during the year an era that's 1282 1368 and when we think of blue and white we don't think of young blue and white we think of Ming blue and white because that's the era in which blue and white porcelain came to Europe first of all through the Portuguese and later the Dutch and the English and when the blue might arrived in Europe it transformed the way people dined and it transformed interiors if you think of laying out a table with pewter and with wood it's all very dark and the ceramics at the time generally had LED glazes so in Europe there would have been greens and browns and rather dull colors and then along comes something like this dish which was made for export and shipped in large quantities to Holland and Portugal in England and it would have transformed interiors by the light reflecting off the dish so you can imagine a more you know multicolored interior and the patterns too were much more interesting so very quickly in Europe people started copying these designs all sorts of ceramics manufacturers right across Europe [Music] here we have a piece which was produced for the export market right at the end of the Ming Dynasty in 1643 this has got a bracket lobe of rim like the first dish that we looked at but it's much coarser in the center you've got the crow with the open mouth of bird with open mouth this giant tree peony and then in the Corvette oh this sort of panel design with alternating flowers and Ling de fungus now these are a kind of fungus or mushroom which bestowed immortality on an individual if we turn it over we can see that it's been rather roughly made it's been fired on its foot ring and has a lot of grit adhering to it and in the center you can see these chatter marks which are like the spokes on the wheel of a bicycle that's very typical of this late material this came from a shipwreck discovered and in the 1980s and it's lain at the bottom of the South China Sea for 300 years and that's why when you look at it it has a very matte feel to it we can't see the same kind of glassy glaze that we see on the earlier Ming pieces discovered in the 1980s and was sold to the museum in 1985 it was one of 23,000 pieces on board quite an extraordinary thing that is a whistle-stop tour of 300 years of Ming porcelain [Music]

Channel: The British Museum

Views: 157,232

Rating: 4.940064 out of 5

Keywords: British Museum, History, Art, Ming, Porcelain, China, Blue and white, ceramic, Jessica Harrison-Hall, cobalt

Id: uwvRXJd22oI

Length: 13min 45sec (825 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 16 2019

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The Ming Dynasty is famed for its blue and white porcelain, which took over European dinning tables thanks to trade with the Dutch, Portuguese and English. However, you might not know exactly how to tell the difference between a Hongwu and a Longqing piece. If you don't, never fear! Curator Jessica Harrison-Hall has you and the entire Ming Dynasty covered!