Porcelain for the Emperors: Imperial Wares of the Song , Ming and Qing Dynasties

good afternoon it's a treat to be in London a pleasure to be with you and a great honor to have been invited to speak here as Brian mentioned Brian Anna and I have known each other for more than 25 years through association in New York largely through the International Asian Art Fair and through working together on that fear we became friends we have maintained our friendship over the years and now I'm thrilled to have been invited to join this gathering of the clan if you will now Rose Carr spoke this morning about what turns out to be our shared preference for Chinese porcelains without ormolu mounts and our shared distaste for ugly Chinese porcelains therefore I will not show you any ormolu mounts I will not show you any ugly Chinese porcelains she did bring up the topic of fakes I hope I don't show you any fakes but if I should do that please have the courtesy to gently whisper so in my ear after the lecture but anyway now when we think of a firsta chronology then we'll go into the lecture itself when we think of later dynastic China we usually think of the song oops wrong one the song un Ming Qing dynasties but we will begin with the Tong for reasons I will explain in just a moment but these are the general dates that were working with when we speak of the Tong dynasty basically say b8 keep doing the wrong one the eighth century when we speak of the northern song it's more or less the eleventh and twelfth centuries southern song 12th and 13th centuries we're just going to touch on the UN but the ming as you can see they're fifteen sixteen seventeen centuries and then the ching the last of the imperial dynasties now when we think or hear the term Imperial Chinese porcelains we tend understandably to think of the great Ming blue and white wears such as this magnificent moon flasks with dragon decor or we might think of the Imperial porcelains of the 18th century with their beautifully painted designs and over glazed enamel very naturalistic designs that of course are inspired by paintings on paper and silk but even though we might think of those as the quintessential image of Chinese imperial portion porcelain the tradition of Imperial porcelain States far earlier than this we don't know when the first Imperial porcelains were made but there were porcelains associated with the imperial court already in the 8th and 9th centuries we know this from recorded mentions in the standard histories but also some from a Kay from some occasional signs now this is a so-called secret color or me saw us celadon where it is extraordinarily beautiful and on first encountering these 9th century Saladin's one would think they probably date later not reason but say to the 11th or 12th century that's how gorgeous they are and how sort of out of character they are for the period now it may not look so great here but that's the fault of the slide not the fault of the object this is one of a small group that was discovered and excavated in the 1980s they are there well published but not with good illustrations and so it's very difficult to get good images of these pieces now just a little bit of background and then I'll tell you a little bit more about them when we think of Tong dynasty we often also think of the so-called son ty or three-color where as you see here but keep in mind this three color wear is made for burial it is a mortuary where it was never used by the living and so that's a taste associated with the funerary where's the taste of wares for the living particularly for the core the upper classes or monochrome where the celadon where which had a long history of development which reaches its first period of great maturity in the Tong dynasty and then the newly perfected white where that is porcelain which comes into being in the eighth and ninth centuries we'll see both of those so but when you hear Tong and you think of three color we're keep in mind that that was mortuary where beautiful as it is it was not meant to be used by the living nor does it represent the taste of the living now this is a map of at least eastern China we're going to switch to a map that shows you a little more detail basically this part of the map now the salad on dish with fully a trim that I just showed you was discovered oh dear from this angle it's hard to see the map but here we are at Xian was discovered at la mancha temple which is about 75 to a hundred miles straight west of Xian a temple the the foundations of which for where the celadon was discovered date to the ninth century but the piece was made far from there the finest porcelains and not porcelain is the finest ceramics it's so long glazed stoneware of that period were made in this region it's called you a where because there was simply the old name of that region and so when we say you err where it refers today to a particular type of wear but it's saying the famous ceramic ware made in the US region in fact the dish was probably made it hung in who just they're not too far from Ning dois and some distance to the south of Shanghai that you see there so it began live here but it ended up over there to the west of Xian in a temple now the reason for that now this is completely reconstructed it was a temple that was founded at least as early of the 6th century it was built had expanded and rebuilt many times over the centuries and there had been various pagodas from various errors there was a Ming Dynasty pagoda probably fifteen sixteenth century that in 1978 partially collapsed and then the rest of it collapsed around 1984 at which time archaeologists decided to do investigations and they discovered in excavating underneath that pagoda were the remains of a Tong dynasty pagoda dating to the ninth century and when they really began to investigate the remains of that early pagoda they found that there was a crypt that had the Saladin's in it and the reason for it is that the emperor had been presented in 873 with five relics of the Buddha basically finger bones some of which were believed to be genuine even today some Buddhists believe them to be genuine after all it's the Emperor of China receiving great relics like glue even into France received the portions of the crown-of-thorns relics of the true cross a nail etc etc but the same relics were as important to Buddhism certainly as they were to Christianity but the emperor and remember the capital then was in what is today Xian Chung on at the time the Emperor had we had had received these relics and decided to deposit them at Foreman's temple they built a new pagoda and the the the relics all kinds of gold and silver reliquaries some precious ceramics and such and many other goods were placed into the crypt I was sealed in 873 and lay undisturbed until the Ming pagoda collapsed in the late 1970s so this provided a real trove now not only that were there precious goods but there was an inventory list and this is very very special it recounted what was the the circumstances of the burial it recounted what was buried there and why it was so precious and of course it indicates that the ceramics were presented by the Emperor and so these were the very finest ceramics of the day so when we talk about Imperial wares of the Tong dynasty we can't know under what circumstances they were done but they're the finest ceramics of the day they were at least ordered by perhaps even commissioned by the court beyond that we don't know much about them but because they were presented to the temple as part of a great ceremony and great ceremonial offering we know that they have to have been the best of the best and associated with the court now like I say what you see today is completely rebuilt the temple site there's a museum there all this and that has become a great tourist attraction and here it is and all of its winter glory with snow and such but remember when the the Ming pagoda collapse and that's a rebuilt being pagoda when it collapsed it looked nothing like this but back to the ceramics these tong ceramics the tongs celadon the secret color where they're not decorated they rely on the geometry of form and the beauty of the glaze for their aesthetic appeal for this period this is unusual in having the foliated rim but a very very beautiful piece so it's light gray stoneware with the beautiful celadon glaze but this must represent one thread in the development of picked of Imperial wares particularly in the Tong dynasty and certainly in the 8th and the 9th century and given that the the the the placement of objects in the crypt took place in 873 these must all date just about then 878 71 72 here is a beautiful again the slide is a very poor quality but the glaze is quite extraordinary a beautiful faceted bottle of the same ware and the same general date and of course these are just cords to keep the piece in place should there be an earthquake or should any of the hordes of tourists happen to bump into the case in the in the gallery but nothing to do with the piece itself because they were in the crypt it was undisturbed the pieces are in very very good condition none of them broken some of them do have burial adhesion on them but they they were not broken and they're very good condition now the other type of imperial wear during the Tong dynasty is the relatively newly invented porcelain now remember celadon had a very long history of development in China the earliest experiments with celadon would date back roughly to the time of Christ so by the time we get to the eighth and ninth centuries it's had hundreds of years of development now the Chinese had always appreciated white wares even producing white earthenware occasionally in the Neolithic period but it's in the excuse me in the Tong dynasty that it really comes to the fore as an important we're not the be-all and end-all as Portland would become later but as an important where a high fired where that can be considered porcelain or at least poor sylvania stoneware like the contemporaneous Saladin's the pieces are undecorated relying upon the geometry of form and the the very beautiful shape the beautiful glaze for the aesthetic appeal there you see it in profile there's no decoration on the interior but I where it was made now this was not made in the the south here where the cellar and where had been made but this was made farther north in hebei province beijing of course is a special city today as is Washington DC in the United States but it's technically within that province where the Shing where as that is known again a place named woods not marked in this map but it would be about seventy-five to a hundred miles north of sushi that you see mark there so this is where some of the the earliest of this beautiful porcelain was produced it too would have been used in Cheung on the capital over here at Xian at the time but made in that general area this is the same dish seeing it in profile again and a few of the pieces will have a mark on the bottom it's not an imperial mark per se like one of the Ming marks indicating a this particular mark reads dying which simply refers to the Treasury but we know from historical records from the period that that Shing wears with this mark were put into that particular Treasury and so it can be associated excuse me associated with the Tong port some of them have a completely flat base not a particular foot ring others of them have a very wide foot ring now this is a more typical type of shing where just to distinguish that that has Imperial connections from the more standard type of Shing wear and there you can see and there would be the same difference really between some of the salad ons the type that I was showing you before presumably with Imperial associations and those made for more general consumption but really a very very high standard already in the in the Tong period or this wonderful jar again Shing we're from the probability from the 9th century and with a mark on the base this one just a single character mark unlike on blue and white where for example whereas painted or mark in in brush written calligraphy under the glaze this is a mark that is incised into the clay body before firing which is typical of these particular marks now the early on a 9th century writer in China made an association between porcelain which was new at the time and silver which was enjoying its first great moment of popularity in China in the seventh eighth and ninth centuries and so in fact we do see some similarities in shape not so much decoration because the Saladin's and the porcelains are undecorated but there are some similarities in shape but the the writer Lou you made the connection between silver and porcelain but then further made the connection between the Saladin's and Jade and so that's some of the background on the taste for those particular colors now here we're leaving behind Tong dynasty we're moving into the sole dynasty which is one of the great classical ages of China and particularly the northern song period this stretches from 960 to 11:27 and this is the age of the great monumental monochrome landscapes as you see here the ceramics of the period particularly the the court where's our monochrome glazed ceramics and they resonate with this kind of monochrome very stately painting now the previous wares had been and the detail is there the previous where that settled on from down here the white where from that area the next where is that we're going to look at the ding where is definitely an imperial ware and it's produced a little bit farther north but also here in the North around Xu young ding ware which many of you are familiar with it was probably first inspired by the Shing ware which we just saw they became very proficient they became competitors with the Shing kilns one way or another they put the Shing kills out of business and they became one of the great royal wares of the Song Dynasty this sign is a little bit yellow excuse me let it say a white wear with kind of a honey colored glaze the decoration is always very subtle in the the northern zone period in the 11th and the beginning of the 12th century when it definitely was an imperial wear the decoration tends to be in incised but more typically carved as we see here it's a usually floral decoration there may be a dragon a baby dragon chor long that kind of thing but tends to be floral decoration when we look at the underside we see that the underside is fully glazed and that's what accounts for the metal rim you see this is another piece where you can kind of sense that the rim is unglazed and therefore soiled or you see the piece in profile and you can really see that the rim is unglazed and because it's unglazed porcelain it's easily soiled of course why would anyone want a vessel with an unglazed rim it has nothing to do believe me with the client's taste even if it is the royal court it has everything to do with efficiency of production at the kiln now what they learn to do and these are the types of sagar that were used at the ding kilns for firing the pieces like a hatbox if you will in which the pieces are placed if you turn the piece if you want to fire it right side up you can only have basically one one object per sanger otherwise if you stack the bowls they're going to fuse the foot ring to the floor of the bowl below but if the ding cones they realized that if they would step the kilns or have the little stair like devices on the interior that if they fired them upside down they could nest the pieces one above the other why was this important to them well they're not only producing luxury objects but these are manufacturers where the bottom line one is a quality product number two its profit and of course if you have one object per sanger you can't put as many pieces in the kiln you're going to burn a lot more wood you're going to use a lot more fuel but if they do it this way they can greatly increase efficiency and cost of production and so one way or another despite the unglazed rims they were able to ban the pieces with metal now the explain in just a minute they banded the pieces with metal to cover the unglazed rim and what must have been one of the great successes in marketing they were able to convince people that the metal band made the pieces very special such that even at the royal court wanted to have the pieces now I said I would explain this type of ban the bands that were used at the time in the 11th and beginning of the 12th century were not the narrow rolled bands if you will that we see here the bands at the time were much wider half an inch maybe in some cases even 3/4 of an inch wide in addition they were very thin metal a little bit thicker than what we would think of as aluminum foil a little bit thicker than that but nothing like much thicker metal that we see here obviously if you have a a band of thin metal it's easily braided easily worn away and most of the original bands were lost but of course they've been repaid we replaced we can't say exactly when a band like that was added perhaps in the 1819 they're even in the 20th century but this type of band is a replacement for the original type of metal band the color of this slide is much better and you can see the creamy white color and the beautiful carving of the lotus blossom there but this was the typical Imperial where of course the Palace used all kinds of wares but when we talk about the Imperial where it's not the only where used in the palace but it's probably the type of where that was on which the Emperor or the imperial family and such was served the type of where that would have appeared on the the Imperial table in the succeeding Jin dynasty which I didn't list on the chronology but begins about 11:15 they did a lot of moulding and some of these are very refined again the decoration is always so subtle and such low relief difficult to see but it's a dragon a coiled dragon in the center surrounded by a band of scrolling clouds they also produce some black wares such as the one here and because the black the black glaze is opaque they couldn't put the kind of molded or carve decoration that we associate with the clear glazes so they learned early on to develop a kind of abstract decoration non-representational it's referred to as a partridge feather glaze it's not that they wanted it to look like a Partridge feather necessarily it's that they come up with a glaze they need a name for it and they decide looks like the breast of the Partridge so it becomes a partridge feather glaze but it's exactly the same white porcelain body as the white ding wear but it has the dark brown glaze and then the splashes of iron oxide on the surface that's another view of the same Bowl looking into it really quite a wonderful piece now of course the wear that we think of most for the northern home period is the Imperial rule where for which only maybe 70 some pieces survive worldwide for reasons we will probe into in just a little bit but there as I mentioned there had been a long tradition in the development of celadon where by the time we come to imperial rule where it's had a history of development of a full millennium from the time of Christ down to around the Year 1000 and certainly around 1100 it is very pale gray stoneware was a beautiful celadon glaze this is one of the most famous of the pieces the bowl with the scalloped trim and foliated sidewalls which is in the collection of the National Palace Museum in Hebei meaning it's almost for its entire history been in the Imperial collection but you're very fortunate here in London to have a number of imperial rule pieces in the David collection on Marla's permanent loan to the British Museum in the collection of the british museum itself the Victorian Albert Museum you have many chances to see imperial rule we're here in London this is in the David collection you can see it at the British Museum excuse me this is a cup stand like a very elaborate saucer remember they were drinking tea they were drinking warmed wine if you will but in in cups without handles so it was very useful to have a cup holder very elegant as well but a cup holder in which a a cup of hot tea could be sent you could hold this like holding a saucer and then pick the cup up to sip tea in the same way that the decoration on the ding ware was basically floral decoration the peony the chrysanthemum the Lotus among the most popular many of the forms are sometimes ending where but also as you see here in rule where imitate forms that occur in nature you the floral forms of this probably imitating a mallow flower so that each notch in the rim separates one petal from the next just as the little relief lines that descend from the notches also emphasize the separation of one petal from the next depending on the kiln some of them the center of the receptacle that receives the cup is open in other cases it may be closed in Roo where it tends to be open as we see there it's a very subtly colored glaze it's difficult to photograph it and get a good representation of the color this is an exam not an example this is a sensor in the collection of the Palace Museum in Beijing this captures a little more of the color of the glaze oh it was probably a little bit too blue and one thing that we might see here is we begin to see the the beginnings of our key ISM in Chinese arts that is looking at the past for inspiration and here I don't bring a comparison but a piece like this is looking at an archaic bronze probably a gilt bronze vessel from the Han Dynasty that is to say around the time of Christ the original Han Dynasty vessel would have been for warming wine here it's taking the form of the vessel the cylindrical form the bands around the center of the little cabriole legs imitating the form but giving it a new function not a wine warming vessel but an incense burner but we will see these kinds of things once they are begun in China often have a continuous strand of development so we have the beginnings of our key ISM in Chinese art in the northern zone period and it's something that will continue until today not only with ceramics but with bronze we see it in painting in all the different arts now this is a relatively newly discovered piece of Roux we're not to say that it just came out of the ground or anything like that but as sometimes happens it's a piece that had languished in the storeroom of the princess health Museum and was recently discovered maybe five years ago recently discovered that is to say its identity rediscovered as Imperial rule where this is a very good slide in terms of color but another feature that you also see here is that crackle powder we don't know for sure whether the crackle pattern was considered desirable at the time or whether it was something that was unwanted some pieces have it many pieces don't have the croco pattern so and because there are so few pieces of imperial rule where we can't we can't say anything with statistical accuracy but what we can say is that in these pieces with a crackle it's not a crack that that goes perpendicular from the top of the glaze down to the underlying body they are crackles that go at a diagonal and they sort of overlap each other so that when you look at it as you see there it gives the impression of what we today might call shattered ice or cracked ice and so when the rule where has that crackle it often looks like that now I said they're only like 70 pieces of rule where world-wide why are there so few well we don't know for sure but I always have an answer so my thoughts are they're probably for reasons that there are so little rule where one imperial rule where was made over a very short period of time not by design but historical circumstances it was produced from say roughly 1100 to 1125 other wares like the the the white ding ware was produced over several centuries so number one produced over about 25 years number two it was manufactured for a very limited clientele that is it was made basically for the Imperial Palace which in the northern tolling period is no longer in Xi'an modern Cheon is much farther east in what was what is today Chi foam on the one the Eastern Band of the Yellow River and so it was made exclusively for the palace so short period of manufacture very limited clientele number three in 11:27 the gin Tartars is that the next yes the northern zone period when those ceramic the white the ding where and the rule where were produced China was this big not quite as large as we see China today but still it was about that size and typhoon the capital was roughly in that area right there now in 1127 the gin Tartars invade and they take over what was the northern part of China there including there what was the old capital of Chi Fung the legitimate Chinese Court fled to the south that is they fled down to excuse me fled down to Hangzhou which I'll show you there's the bay of Hangzhou right there fled there and established a new capital of Hangzhou and I'll show you one a better map in just a moment but it's just to say the Jin Tartars invaded took over the northern part of China the illegitimate Chinese Court fled to we say the south of course at central China the central coastal China there established a new capital now you can imagine in the face of invasions they're fleeing for their lives they're not going to carry all their household goods with them the necessities yes spend most of the rule we're got left behind and then the invading Tartars of course in invading the capital probably destroyed the palace destroyed the contents of the palace and such so short period of manufacture limited clientele left behind when the court left and the invaders destroyed it so very few pieces left today so what happens then well the new where produced like I say the court fled from - let's see if I can see if this angle I don't think it's there it's right there on the map is where the northern stone capital was the gym the gin Tartars come in take over that part of China up there the court flees down here to Hangzhou where they establish a new capital that's in 11:27 by the end of the 12th century they're producing a new Imperial we're known as Guan we're and one simply means official so official we're for the palates probably they wanted to try to revive the ruler that they remembered excuse me from the palace and Chi Fung in the northern zone period but they are different potters they're in a different area working with different clays the result simply wasn't the same the rule where had a very pale gray stoneware body and then that beautiful light blue Lewis green glaze the Guan we're by contrast as you can sense there at the lip the lip is glazed but during firing gravity pulled it so it's somewhat thin over the lip you can sense it in the very best pieces of Guan where it's a very dark slate gray stoneware body not light grey and certainly not white porcelain so it's a very dark body and then it has this very thickly applied grayish blue sometimes blueish grey glaze as we'll see in other slides the glaze was applied there in many application there were at least several applications before firing and what the very thick glaze means and in some of the pieces when you see a chip or a shard one sees that the glaze on either side of the underlying body is actually thicker than the body itself bit like an Oreo cookie with the body being the thin cream filling and the glaze being kindred to the wafers that hold the cookie together now when you get a glaze that thick particularly during the cooling after the firing the glaze may well begin to form crackles now this brush pot again in the collection of the National Palace Museum in Taipei a beautiful example it's flawless very very little crackle carefully on the inside you can see the beginnings of such but not really a crackle where this to have probably been in the Imperial collection since a very beginning it was in the collection of the Chen long emperor about who we've heard mentioned many times and he had a poem inscribed on the base of the piece it's just to say this is how precious it was considered that in the same way that the Emperor might inscribe a poem collected painting sometimes on his collected antiquities he similarly would have a poem inscribed as you see there now here you begin to see the the crackles and originally the the crackles probably were not wanted and when the first pieces came out of the kiln with crackles the thought was probably up here now what do we do with this we don't want crackles but then with such thick glaze on a thin body there was really no way to present to prevent it in most circumstances so they turned lemons into lemonade and learn to emphasize the crackles - very beautiful effect as we see here the beautiful bluish blue glaze now something like this it's not that it was fired upside down and had an unglazed lip not at all that's simply a bit of repair probably had a slightly averted lip the lip was damaged ground down to simply be a circular top and then banded with metal to cover the the exposed body clay so not a normal amount and not originally meant to be banded but there you go now some of the wares have very little crackle as we see here others of them have a great deal of crackle as we see there now of course this presented various challenges first of all there was crackle and how to make it acceptable so that you could sell the wares and in the same way that with the ding ware with an unglazed rim make it marketable to sell it that the metal band is really a glorious thing it sets it apart from the ordinary it's like a crown on the bowl here how do we sell something with a crackle glaze well some of the crackles seem to have come out of the kiln dark due to manipulation of the kiln during firing but in other cases they probably rubbed ink on the same ink that would be used for painting and calligraphy into the crackles which actually usually slightly break the surface of the glaze and so they were able to market this as just a beautiful abstract design the difficulty of course was having the crackle come out in a somewhat regular fashion that is when you look at some other crackle glazes you find that you have a very very loose crackle pattern as you see here in other cases it may be a very dense crackle you look at something like this now in certain cases that probably came out mixed that a piece have the dense crackle that you see here and the loose crackle that you see there so then what they had to do here is to come up with a crackle pattern that was a beautiful pattern aesthetically pleasing and that for the most part is uniform in density over the surface again of the Chinese potters being some of the world's greatest mastered the challenge and produced the beautiful one where that we see here and when it has the very fine very dense pattern we usually refer to it or the Chinese called it go where as you see well Guan where'd go where but it indicates the very dense crackle pattern or this is one that's go away with the very dense pattern again sometimes it may be more greyish in appearance sometimes more bluish in appearance but seldom is actually a bluish green celadon color but ranging from greyish blue to bluish gray now there you go it's kind of a little range there now the rest of the ceramics that we see by and large come from Jing de Jong that great ceramics capital in northeastern Yong Chi province right kind of off the map but right here in this area Jing DeJohn to the south in terms of modern locations to the southwest of Shanghai I suppose 150 miles something like that so we're going to deal with porcelain this is a type of blue and white wear that we associate the very best blue and white wear that we associate with the Ming Dynasty when the blue and white wear first became an imperial wear now the reason for putting doing the the lacquer up is just to say that once we get to the Ming Dynasty there is a taste for an expanding palette of colors the the preferred color for lacquer in earlier periods was not the cinnabar red that we see here it was either black or sort of black coffee brown but the cinnabar lacquer begins to emerge in the late sone period becomes popular in the 14th century during the Yuan Dynasty that period of Mongol rule and then really flourishes in Ming and Qing periods and there you see it or you see it in cloisonne and cloisonne is a relatively new development in the 14th and 15th centuries but there's suddenly a taste for this broad palette of colors that we see there or in something like this from the late 15th or early 16th century taste that we hadn't seen represented that is in in articles luxury articles hadn't seen this expression of color before and that's part of what accounts for the presumably the popularity of blue and white where now this goes back to the Song Dynasty what I want to say here is that blue and white wear wasn't invented and just come into being in the Ming Dynasty ginga john itself had a long history of production really rising to prominence with the production of so-called ching by sometimes called yang ching wherein the song period it is the same porcelain body that we see in blue and white we're basically the same type of glaze it just has a little more bluish color to it what the potters at Jing de Jong did was simply to stop using incised carved or molded decoration and substitute decoration painted in under glaze cobalt blue of course there's the influence from the west and west meaning Iran Persia and such but the development in China uses the under glaze cobalt to affect that we see here and then reduces the amount of iron oxide in the glaze thereby reducing the bluish hue of the color of the glaze to produce wares like this so this is an example of 14th century blue and white wear or another example the reason I show you right they're in kind of the two o'clock position there is an inscription in pseudo Arabic if you will it looks enough like Arabic we can identify that they were copying something Arabic but the the Potter doing the decoration didn't understand the language and didn't quite do it in illegible fashion so it can actually be read but what it reminds us is that in the 14th century much of the blue and white where was was exported it went to the near and Middle East it went to India of course some of it was used in China but it was not a court where it was not an aristocratic where rather it was sort of a lower-class wear if you will there's a detail of the inscription the underside of the piece and here suddenly now is a beautiful Ming blue and white piece and it is in the late 14th century when the blue and white where first becomes an imperial ware and this shows you some of the stylistic and thematic differences between the 14th century un dynasty blue and white wear and the very staid very majestic absolutely precisely and perfectly painted Imperial type wear from the early 15th century how did it go from being aware that was basically for export and some of the sophisticates of the period that is of the 14th century tell us that blue and white wear was basically best left to Buddhist temples Taoist shrines and for export none of which of course was considered a very hot class how did it go from being aware of course the the taste and the period keep in mind was fourth celadon and when this entered the picture it was considered garish that kind of thing just over the top how did it suddenly go from being aware that was considered a low-class and garish to being an imperial court where well again we don't know but of course I have a theory one the basic thing is that the founder of the Ming Dynasty Zhu Yuanzhang himself had been born he well he was orphaned as a child he was raised in a Buddhist monastery my guess would be that since some of this 14th century blue-and-white wear was used in Buddhist monasteries Taoist shrines he probably saw it there thought it was very beautiful as a little poor orphan boy in 1368 now he had become a general etc etc in 1368 he overthrow the mongols and he establishes the ming dynasty he sets up his palace the first capital of the ming was not in beijing it was in nanjing meaning southern capital later few decades later its ends up being traveled to Beijing the northern capital but he probably decided I thought blue and white where was so beautiful I wouldn't have blue and white where on my table and I wanted to be painted in the most exquisite manner possible so anyway you have the transformation from 14th century to early 15th century style and of course it's the early 15th century blue and white where that is regarded as the great classic blue and white wear of China they also produce great white wares some without decoration but often with very Suckley in size decoration as this particular moon flask has we've seen this before it's just to show that it's a very naturalistic design the flowers the blossoms in particular are painted with such precision that botanists even gardeners can identify exactly what the flowers are or the beautiful dragon it's just meticulous painting on these pieces of this wonderful large jar this is the first era in which we usually or frequently get Imperial rain marks aren't pieces destined for the palace now in the preceding young la reine there had been occasional use of rain marks often in size rather than painted but it's in this trend a period from fourteen twenty six to fourteen thirty five that we get the frequent standard use of rain marks on just these wonderful designs now kind of an improbable depiction of a dragon striding through a floral arabesque but it's a kind of design that comes out of text decoration so there all kinds of relationships in these early Ming ceramics there will be influences from Islamic metalwork again imported from Iran and catching the attention of the Potters some of those in metal and Islamic metalwork shapes made for export to Iran and such but some of those shapes catching the fancy of the court in China as well or you get the reverse where you have the dragon in reserved and white against this wonderful pattern of rolling blue waves or ones like this beautiful dish again the reverse the flowers reserved in white against the blue round and this is one of the most extraordinary pieces of early 15th century blue and white where a fish a lotus pond with fish swimming in it now this is an example of a 14th century again it's a jar instead of a dish but to put the two side-by-side you see the very delicate treatment of the the articulation of the shape not just foliated sidewalls but with those foliation scaried continuing into the base I have a detail as where you can see it a little more clearly there but notice how much more delicately it's painted here but also using cobalt that has a great deal of iron impurity in it by design around the edges of the lotus leaf up there to show that it's a dying decaying leaf with the black and what would be a brown edge in nature here you can see it a little more clearly here you see the underside with the Imperial mark on the base in the double circle but you also see how the foliation 's of the sidewalls continued into the foot ring something difficult to do and we seldom find it outside of the the shrine terrain again 14:26 to 1435 and there's the mark itself again painted or written with a brush under glaze cobalt they also worked with under glaze copper red which is very difficult to use it is somewhat obstreperous demanding that is to say it needs to have not only exactly the right kiln atmosphere but the firing temperature needs to be something like plus or minus five degrees from exactly the right temperature to get it to turn the beautiful strawberry jam red it's a little bit under fired it may be mold if it's seriously under fired it may be gray instead of red at all but in this render period again when those blue and white pieces were produced they're able to master the color and so one of the problems with copper is getting the color exactly right the other serious problem with copper if you under glaze copper if you will is that it has a tendency to bleed cobalt is very forgiving it can hold fine lines it can hold a hard wash edge so it's very easy to paint so to speak with cobalt by contrast the copper likes to bleed and blur as you see there that brings me to the point that in the trend up here it once again they meet the challenge and they of the earliest designs not using underglaze copper they were imitating the designs of the blue and white where in this render period they come to realize that no stop trying to copy the fine lines and hard edged washes of blue and white where instead use something where the design is silhouetted against an otherwise blank round and if the coop bleeds a little bit it only enhances the effect interior of the stem cup with the surrender mark and this is one of the most beautiful in my estimation one of the most beautiful of all pieces of of Chinese porcelain with underglaze copper red decoration a little bit too much so to speak cobalt there and it turned green it bleeds a little bit but it just gives the pomegranate this wonderful effect on this beautiful stem Cup again in the National Palace Museum in Taipei but they also learn I didn't really show you but they also used and would mix cobalt with the glaze to produce a beautiful vibrant blue glaze but in their experiments with copper they learned that they could put copper you know side of copper or whatever in the glaze to produce a beautiful red glaze again some of the most beautiful ones from the early 15th century looking like crushed strawberries or this beautiful and also from the 15th century now again it wasn't always easy particularly for them in the Ming Dynasty to get exactly the right shade of red whether it's under glazed copper or a copper blaze they learned to do over glazed enamel and that's the beginning of the later tradition of porcelain in China like I said before anything once begun in China basically continues the line of development so of course after the early 15th century they continued to produce blue and white we're in the mid 15th century the 16th century the 17th century but in this little overview we don't have time to explore all of that so I'm trying to show you what the new the new thing of each particular era is so I'll show you a bit more blue and white but it's to say it's in this period that they begin to discover when they've discovered it before but they began to use the over glazed enamel the over glazed iron red is very easy to control it doesn't bleed it's very forgiving in terms of firing temperature they're now in the mid 15th century they also produce blue and white where this is the other great classic age of Chinese blue and white we're in the chung hua area arrow from fourteen sixty five to fourteen eighty seven the cobalt tends to be a little bit lighter in hue sometimes even with a slightly silvery effect and the designs are often a little more stylized so you have a stylized Lotus here instead of the botanically correct blossoms of the early 15th century these are botanically correct but somewhat more subtle in presentation rather than the very bold ones another thing that they begin to use to great advantage are two different tonality zuv cobalt they experimented with it before but it really comes into its own in the mid 15th century here for example with the very dark cobalt used for the Dragons set against the very light cobalt used for the rolling waves now back to the over glazed enamel from here on the leading tradition even though they produce pure white wares they produce glazes that are red they produce blue and white where the the new things that will capture the imagination of the era is the over glazed enamel so that of course when this came out of the kiln after its primary porcelain firing it was a blue and white piece then they added the iron red enamel created the designs and fired it again we begin to have an emphasis on monochrome glazes as well if glaze if you will now remember the big difference in the Song Dynasty they are subtly huge monochrome glazes basically Saladin's or white wares or black glazed wears black might not be subtle but anyway softly huge wares for this home in the Ming and Ching they tend to be brightly colored monochromes as we see here now of course when that came out of the kiln after primary porcelain firing it was pure white then the over glaze that yellow enamel was added fired again and here we go now something like this this was a blue and white piece when it comes out of the kiln given the yellow enamel just in the background areas not over the flowers are over the blue otherwise they would look kind of black as they do there with a double circle where the enamel covers or you see areas over here where the enamel didn't quite cover it to produce this particular effect here for example when this one came out of the kiln that is the one on the right it looked much like the one over there then you add the yellow enamel to the background voila you have that particular piece the color combination perhaps looks just a little bit unusual to our eyes but keep in mind that in this era particularly in the 15th century the blue and white where was the most preferred where at the imperial court also keep in mind that unlike in the West particularly Rome where the Imperial color was purple the Imperial color in China was yellow that is gold and so you have the perfect combination of blue and white where with the Imperial yellow ground to it and so how much aesthetics explains in that particular period that particular combination and how much its imperial symbolism is difficult to say but this becomes a standard type the blue and white where with the added yellow ground then of course in the mid 15th century we have the emergence of the so-called oats I wear oats I of course is a later term but adults I were not exactly certain what it means there are various arguments but what we think probably best describes the meaning of the term is that it means dovetailed that is fitted together sometimes referred to as joined and what we mean by that and I have I have a couple of details coming up to see but you see again when it came out of the kiln primary porcelain fire it was simply blue and white then the green and yellow enamels were fitted into outlines that were already there an under glazed cobalt blue it was fired at a lower temperature then and yet another firing at successive firing the red enamel was added but when we say joined colors or fitted colors it means that the enamel colors are fitted within underglaze blue outlines and so it's referred to as doe time this is a doe type piece in our collection from from again from the mid 15th century and here you can see it a little closer and here you can see the outlines very clearly in under glaze cobalt blue how the enamels are fitted into those outlines to create the dotes eye effect this is a very famous one in the David collection now on view at the British Museum of garden rock and various blossoming plants surrounding it with the underglaze blue soil down there the under glaze blue outlines and then the enamels that's the mark on the piece from the chung hua rain 1465 287 and then of course the most famous pieces today from the chung hua era and dots are the so-called chicken cups this is one that's old several years ago in Hong Kong for sending like 36 million dollars u.s. to the owner of the private long museum in Shanghai it's simply a family of chickens done in the doulton colors and these become have become wildly popular today obviously with prices like that being paid now we'll quickly look at a few sting ceramics and be finished like I say when something starts the tradition continues so a great deal a great number of monochrome vases were produced in the Ching dynasty on porcelain it's the same kind of copper red glaze basically that we saw initiated in the Ming period but they manipulate it so that instead of having an even homogeneous glaze they manipulated such as a great deal of variation so-called oxblood glaze or long Yao as it's known in Chinese with the desire that there will be some white up there the glaze the copper elements in the glaze pulling away giving that kind of variation or this particular effect sometimes referred to as a peach bloom glaze where there's a great deal of modulation in the color of the glaze by intent it's not an accident so rather than being an even homogeneous color throughout it's the same basic red but through the judicious application of the of the of the glaze but also probably bits of extra copper added here and there to create the splashes and such there or something like this where even though the copper basically produces the red that we see if there is an excess of copper it will cause it to flash green as you see here and so to get something like this they have to know exactly what they're doing just the right amount of excess copper to produce a wonderful green splash and a touch up there as well but not to give two largest flash and overshadow the the red color something new in this period is the introduction of the pink enamel this is one of the few areas where we have Nicoll influence from the west of course there had been much influence from the west over the centuries things coming in over the Silk Road or with the blue and white we're in the early Ming period Islamic influence in decoration in shapes and such but that's basically stylistic influence decoration form that kind of thing there was very little technical influence from outside of China but the pink is one place that was a technical influence transmitted by Jesuit missionaries in the late 17th and beginning of the 18th century missionaries from Italy from Venice who knew about the Glass Works in Murano in in Venice and the use of colloidal gold to produce pink glass or pink markings in blasts and the Jesuit missionaries who were interested in this kind of thing transmitted that knowledge from Italy to China the Chinese Potter's used it using colloidal gold which simply means powdered gold in the glaze which would produce the beautiful pink that you see there the same way that I mentioned our key is and began in the sonne period you get our key ISM in the Ming Dynasty but particularly in the ching dynasty of copying the shape of ancient bronze vessels and reviving the old guan glaze that is the greyish blue glazed with crackles which they revived here they revived DOTA of course it's a continuation but it's a new fluorescence of the DOTA which has the join colors that is the underglaze blue outlines with the enamel colors added here you can see it better I take the caption away one side of this beautiful bars rotating it and seeing it up close we can really see all those outlines and the use of underglaze blue and then the enamel colors fitted in there a little bit out of sequence doing Chen long before we do Jung Jung but it's just to say they they marveled in this use of the pink enamel that you see there or something like this where you have the pink but the other big innovation that comes in that separates the use of these enamels from what we saw in the Ming Dynasty with the dosa or some of the late Ming and now is that you not only have the addition of the pink or rows enamel but in addition they learned that they could add tin oxide to the enamels to make the enamel opaque so then they had a choice of clear transparent enamel or an opaque enamel and what that immediately means is that you can have more gradation of color as you see in the pomegranates you see in the peach a pomegranate over here but it also means that you can have not only a gradation of color but through through the gradation of color you can suggest recession into space and therefore the designs become much more pictorial if you think back about the chicken cup yes you had chickens your head of rock this and that but think how much more pictorial this is and they will become even more pictorial this is one of the great glories of the David collection on view at the British Museum from the jung-geun period early 18th century these really become translations into ceramic decoration of paintings on paper and silt so there's no under glaze painting whatsoever here an undergrad blue mark on the bottom but the decoration when it came out of the kiln it was pure white so all of the decoration is added in over glazed enamel and notice the gradations of color of the use of the tin oxide to create the white and thereby two gradations in the pink and such this is the same flask the other side of it wait sorry I put in two slides one without the caption the other side of it this is not underglaze blue this is a blue enamel they did that so that they could have a completely uniform surface with all decoration in enamel it also meant that with some pieces they could produce a blank if you will add chain to John and then the decoration could be done elsewhere if you have underglaze part of the decoration and under grade cobalt blue probably means all of the decoration will be done at the same place but one of the great marvels of early 18th century ceramic ware or this beautiful piece with over glazed blue enamel over glazed black enamel under the blue to texture the rocks and then here you really the use of the of the white enamel to create gradations in the color and the shading of these beautiful quail in the garden they're evil able to show the plants with the the ends of the leaves turning brown or this wonderful bowl in the British Museum collection with its young jeong mark but it's wonderful butterfly roundels done with such sophistication such beautiful painting another of them here and so this is really the some of the greatest of the Imperial porcelain tradition from China and this is I have a couple more slides but this is the last object I show you where in in sort of translating painting on paper and silk into ceramic decoration they move from the colorful kind of painting to something that really is monochrome ink painting using just brown or black enamel on the surface and so you have an old plum tree in blossom with the weathered bark and the beautiful blossoms that appear before the tree dawns its leaves another view and this is a view from another Bowl but it's a professional shot as opposed to ones that I took myself of that other piece on display but you can see that the painting of the oops the their work or somebody back there did them one of the tip anyway not only do you have the painting in the dark enamel but in the imitation of a painting on paper or silk it has the added inscription and beautiful calligraphy and in that rose enamel you even have the imitation of the seals and so this is really the one of the crowning glories of the Chinese porcelain tradition particularly of the Ching dynasty well this has been something of an Orient Express for the through the history of Chinese imperial ceramics but I hope it gives something of the flavor of the different periods from the beginnings of the salad on zan point where as Imperial wares in the Tong dynasty the maturation of the salad ons and the taste for monochrome subtly hued monochromes in the two halves of the Song Dynasty the triumph of blue and white whereas the Imperial wear in the beginning of the fifteenth century and then they give way to the enamel porcelains in the later Ming and certainly into the Qing Dynasty so that's more or less the flow in terms of development of Imperial porcelains in China thank you very much [Applause]

Channel: HaughtonInternational

Views: 8,093

Rating: 4.8878503 out of 5

Keywords: porcelain, emperors, imperial, wares, song, dynasties, robert, mowry, ceramics, chinese, court, ming, qing

Id: kKNInLrkhbg

Length: 65min 22sec (3922 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 15 2018