Beautiful vessels and plates of porcellana, large and small . . . for one Venetian groat you could actually have three bowls so beautiful that no one would know how to devise them better. . . .’ So wrote the young Venetian Marco Polo about the yingqing (`misty blue‘) porcelain he saw on his journeys through China in about 1271-5.

Until this time, China was virtually unknown to Europeans except as `Seres’, the land of silk, although as early as the Tang dynasty of AD 618-906, jewels, horses, medicines, wild animals and literature were flowing into the country from India, Arabia and Japan.

Then, towards the end of the Ming dynasty (1368-1644), Jesuit missionaries to China spread knowledge of science and technology, and opened the way for trade with the West. Initially, the main trade was in silks and spices, mostly in exchange for silver bullion, but in the late 16th and early 17th centuries, large kraak dishes and vases were imported by Portuguese and Dutch traders. A very few rare, commissioned examples with inscriptions and coats of arms were the precursors of a huge trade in made-to-order Chinese porcelain which developed in the late 17th century.

Antique Collector Magazine

Tea and China

But it was tea that caused the real explosion of trade between East and West. The first tea arrived in Europe from China in the middle of the 17th century and was an immediate success despite its huge cost — around £300 a pound at today’s prices. Chests of tea soon included a teapot, usually in either the red stoneware of Yixing, which was widely imitated in Europe, or in `blanc-de-Chine’ porcelain from Fujian province. These white wares were also much copied, and a lot of early European porcelain of the 18th century, including that by Meissen, Chelsea and Bow, was in this style. Before long, tea sets and dinner services of all sorts were being sent by the shipload to Europe. Many of these were thinly potted, white porcelain services painted in underglaze blue, of much higher quality than contemporary European earthenware and yet fantastically cheap.

Other wares were painted in enamel colours in Canton (Guangzhou). The style of enamel painting known in Europe as famille-verte’ was fully developed by the Kangxi period (1662-1722) and was revived late in the loth century. The enamels are transparent and are dominated by a distinctive green along with red, yellow and blue. Variations on famille-verte - famille-jaune and famine- noire - have the same design against a yellow or black background respectively. These were much copied by the Chinese in the late loth and early loth centuries.

The famille-rose colour scheme, based on pink, was introduced in the 1720s and was immediately successful both in China and in Europe. It remained the most popular of the Chinese colour families throughout the 18th and loth centuries. Huge numbers of dinner and tea services, tureens, vases, wall dishes and figures were decorated in this way.

Out of Isolation

Trade between the West and Japan was much more limited than that with China, especially after the Shogun Ieyasu Tokugawa closed the doors to Western influence in the 1630s. By 1640, the Dutch and Chinese were Japan’s only trading partners, and even they were restricted to an island in Nagasaki Harbour.

Japanese porcelain was always much more expensive than Chinese wares, and in addition to plain blue and white, arrived in Europe in two distinct enamel styles: Imari and Kakiemon. Imari wares are mostly in the form of large wall dishes or garnitures of vases, and were popular from the last quarter of the 17th century onwards. But Kakiemon porcelain, with its distinctive colours, was more sought after - and copied - in Europe, and remains the most prized Japanese porcelain today.

The isolation of Japan was broken by the Americans in 1853, and a craze for all things Japanese dominated the Aesthetic movement of the 1870s. High-quality porcelain, pottery (particularly ‘Satsuma’ ware - a finely- crackled earthenware with enamelled and gilt decoration), bronzes, ironwork, ivory carvings, cloisonné enamels, prints and lacquer all poured into Europe and the USA.

Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)
Beautiful Collectible Vessels and Plates of Porcelain