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PREFATORY NOTE.
The Art Primers of the Pennsylvania Museum and School of Industrial Art are designed to furnish, in a compact form, for the use of collectors, historical and art students and artisans, the most reliable information, based on the latest discoveries, relating to the variousindustrial arts. Each monograph, complete in itself, contains a historical sketch, review of processes, description of characteristic examples of the best productions. and all available data that will serve to facilitate the identification of specimens. In other words, these booklets are intended to serve as authoritative and permanent reference works on the various subjects treated. The illustrations employed, unless otherwise stated, are reproductions of examples in the Museum collections.
In reviewing the various branches of ceramics, the geographical arrangement used by other writers has given place to the natural or technical classification to permit the grouping of similar wares of all countries and times, whereby pottery, or opaque ware, is classified according to glaze, its most distinctive feature, while, on the other hand, porcelain, or translucent ware, is grouped according to body or paste. Hard Paste Porcelain may be divided into two groups: a. Hard Paste Porcelain of China and Japan.
b. Hard Paste Porcelain of Europe and the United States.
In preparing the material for a Primer on Oriental Hard Paste Porcelain, the author has consulted the numerous reliable authorities on the subject, but he has drawn more particularly from the works of the late Mr. William M. Laffan, of New York, and the late Dr. Stephen W.
Bushell, the eminent sinologues, for the most recent information, which is incorporated in these pages. To Dr. Bushell’s investigations in China, covering a period of some twenty-five years, while connected with the British Legation at Peking, we are indebted for the readjustment of the chronology of Chinese porcelains, which has cleared up many disputed points and fixed the correct places of the different classes of porcelains, some of which had, previous to the appearance of his authoritative and exhaustive work on Oriental Ceramic Art, in 1899, been thought to be much older than they are now known to be.
E.A.B.
HARD PASTE PORCELAIN
(ORIENTAL).
The hard paste porcelain of China is composed of two materials, kaolin, or white clay, which is infusible, but imparts plasticity to the paste, and petuntse
(feldspar), which produces translucency. In addition to these requisite elements, other substances often enter into Chinese porcelains, in varying quantities, such as powdered quartz and certain kinds of sand. The white porcelain glaze is composed of the best quality of petuntse, to which a considerable proportion of lime is added, which latter imparts the greenish or bluish tinge peculiar to Chinese porcelain. The greater the amount of lime in the composition, the coarser is the glaze.
All Chinese porcelain is hard paste. Until recent years collectors believed that the variety of porcelain which possesses a creamy white glaze was soft paste, but this supposition is now known to be erroneous.
CHARACTERISTICS.
Oriental Hard Paste Porcelain is a close grained, vitrified substance, opaque when thick, but translucent in its thinner parts. It is so hard that it cannot be scratched with a steel point. The glaze, when compared with soft paste porcelain, is of a distinctly bluish tint and when pressed with the palm of the hand it is perceptibly colder, being a more perfect conductor of heat. When undecorated, it closely resembles French and other hard paste porcelains. but shows its origin in itsforms and general treatment. When decorated it can readily be distinguished from European hard pastes by the marked peculiarities of the paintings and often by the distinctive colors used.
On account of the difficulty in separating the Oriental stonewares from the porcelains, we shall include under the latter head all of the kaolinic pastes, both opaque and translucent, since in external appearance there is a close resemblance between them, and it is next to impossible, owing to the thickness and opacity of the coarser pastes, to determine just where Chinese stoneware ceases and porcelain begins, both being covered, as a rule, with the same porcelanous glaze. The earlier porcelains of the Ming dynasty, which extended from 1368 to 1643 of the Christian era, were more vigorous and barbaric in form and coloring, and heavier and coarser in paste than those of the present dynasty, from 1644 to the present time, which latter, in respect to translucency, fineness and thinness of paste, and exquisite color, reached their highest perfection in the last third of the seventeenth century and through the eighteenth,a period represented by the K’ ang-hsi and following two or three reigns.
THE PORCELAIN OF CHINA.
ANTIQUITY.
During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the exquisite products of the Chinese potters influenced the ceramic art of the entire civilized world and we find that the pottery and porcelain of Europe made at that time strongly reveal the Oriental methods in the forms of vessels and their decorative treatment. The Delft of Holland and England; the stanniferous, or tin-enameled faience of France, Sweden, Germany and other Continental countries; the maiolica of Spain and Mexico; the frit paste porcelain of France, of Chelsea, Derby, Bow and Worcester, in England, and the hard paste porcelains of Germany and France, all reveal a marked attempt to imitate the porcelain of the Celestial Empire. At first these efforts resulted only in a superficial resemblance, but soon after the beginning of the eighteenth century, through the discoveries of Bottger, of Dresden, and other investigators, true hard porcelain bodies and glazes were perfected, which in composition and appearance closely simulated the Chinese wares.
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