Chinese porcelain part 4


The hare's fur Jian tea bowl illustrated is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. It was made during the Song dynasty (960 to 1279 AD) and exhibits the typical pooling, or thickening, of the glaze near to its foot. The hare's fur patterning in the glaze of this bowl resulted from the random effect of phase separation during early cooling in the kiln and is unique to this bowl, no two bowls have identical patterning. The bowl also has an iron-foot which is typical of these wares. It would have been fired, probably with several thousand other other pieces, each in its own stackable saggar, in a single-firing in a large dragon kiln. One such kiln, built on the side of a steep hill, was almost 150 meters in length, though most Jian dragon kilns were fewer than 100 meters in length.

An eleventh century resident of Fujian wrote: "Tea is of light color and looks best in black cups. The cups made at Jianyang are bluish-black in color, marked like the fur of a hare. Being of rather thick fabric they retain the heat, so that when once warmed through they cool very slowly, and they are additionally valued on this account. None of the cups produced at other places can rival these. Blue and white cups are not used by those who give tea-tasting parties" (Bushell 1977).

Jian tea wares of the Song dynasty were greatly appreciated and copied in Japan, where they were known as temmoku or tenmoku wares. Phase separation in the iron-rich glazes of Chinese blackwares was also used to produce the well-known oil-spot, teadust and partridge-feather glaze effects.

Qingbai wares

Song dynasty qingbai bowlQingbai wares were made at Jingdezhen and at many other southern kilns from the time of the Northern Song Dynasty until their almost complete eclipse, starting early in the fourteenth century, by underglaze-decorated blue and white wares. The qingbai glaze is a porcelain glaze, so-called because it was made using

 porcelain stone. The qingbai glaze is clear, but contains iron in small amounts. When applied over a white porcelain body the glaze produces a greenish-blue colour that gives the glaze its name (qingbai in Chinese means greenish-blue). Bowls, some with incised or moulded decoration and varying from the everyday to more finely made pieces represent the overwhelming bulk of surviving qingbai wares.

The Song dynasty qingbai bowl illustrated was possibly made at the Jingdezhen village of Hutian, which was also the site of the Imperial kilns established in the year 1004. The bowl has incised decoration, possibly representing clouds or the reflection of clouds in the water. The body is white, translucent and has the texture of very fine sugar, indicating that it was made using crushed and refined porcelain stone, rather than a mixture of porcelain stone and china clay. The glaze and the body of the bowl would have been fired together, in a saggar, possibly in a large wood-burning dragon-kiln or climbing-kiln typical of southern kilns of the period.

Though not the case with the bowl illustrated, many Song and Yuan qingbai bowls were fired upside down in special segmented saggars, a technique first developed at the Ding kilns in Hebei province. The rims of such wares were left unglazed but were often bound with bands of silver, copper or lead.

One remarkable example of qingbai porcelain is the so-called Fonthill Vase, described in a guide to Fonthill Abbey published in 1823 as "...an oriental china bottle, superbly mounted, said to be the earliest known specimen of porcelain introduced into Europe". The vase was made at Jingdezhen, probably around the year 1300 and was sent as a present to Pope Benedict XII from the court of the last Yuan emperor of China, in 1338. The mounts referred to in the 1823 description were of enameled silver-gilt and were added to the vase in Europe in 1381. An eighteenth century watercolor of the vase complete with its mounts exists, but the mounts themselves were removed from the vase in the nineteenth century and lost. The vase is now in the National Museum of Ireland. It is often held that qingbai wares, which were not subject to restrictions and regulations applied to the production of some other porcelain wares, were made for everyday use and that, even though they are highly regarded today, they were not valued as significant at their time of production. The Fonthill Vase, given by a Chinese emperor to a pope, might appear to cast at least some doubt on this view. It is, however, also the case that qingbai wares were mainly mass-produced and that they have received little attention from scholars and antiquarians.

                                                                                                           Cont'd Part 5

 

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