Chinese porcelain part 6

Fakes and reproductions

Chinese potters have a long tradition of borrowing design and decorative features from earlier wares. Whilst ceramics with features thus borrowed might sometimes pose problems of provenance, they would not generally be regarded as either reproductions or fakes. However, fakes and reproductions have also been made at many times during the long history of Chinese ceramics and continue to be made today in ever-increasing numbers.

Reproductions of Song dynasty Longquan celadon wares were made at Jingdezhen in the early eighteenth century, but outright fakes were also made there, using special clay and artificially aged by boiling in meat broth, refiring and storage in sewers. Pθre d'Entrecolles records that by this means the wares could be passed off as being hundreds of years old.

At Jingdezhen the two remaining wood fired, egg-shaped kilns produce convincing reproductions of earlier wares and at Zhejiang province good reproductions of Song Longquan celedon wares continue to be made in large, side-stoked dragon kilns.
Before World War II, the English potter Bernard Leach found what he took to be genuine Song dynasty cizhou rice-bowls being sold for very little money on the dock of a Chinese port and was surprised to learn that they were in fact newly made.
In modern times the market for Song dynasty Jian tea-bowls has been severely depressed by the appearance in large numbers of modern fakes good enough to deceive even expert collectors. It is reported that some of these fakes show evidence of having had genuine Song dynasty iron-foot bases grafted onto newly made bodies.
In the late nineteenth century fakes of Kangxi period famille noire wares were made that were convincing enough to deceive the experts of the day. Many such pieces may still be seen in museums today, as may pieces of genuine Kangxi porcelain decorated in the late nineteenth century with famille noire enamels. A body of modern expert opinion holds that porcelain decorated with famille noire enamels was not made at all during the Kangxi period, though this view is disputed (de Boulay 1973).

A fashion for Kangxi period (1662 to 1722) blue and white wares grew to large proportions in Europe during the later years of the nineteenth century and triggered the production at Jingdezhen of large quantities of porcelain wares that looked back to the ceramics of the earlier period. Such blue and white wares were not fakes or even convincing reproductions, even though some pieces carried four-character Kangxi reign-marks that continue to cause confusion to this day. Kangxi reign-marks in the form shown in the illustration occur only on wares made towards the end of the nineteenth century or later, without exception.

Kangxi reign mark on a piece of late nineteenth century blue and white porcelain.

Authentication
The value of testing in the authentication of Chinese porcelain is disputed. The most widely-known test, the thermo-luminescence test (TL-test) can be used to provide an estimate, within very wide limits, of the date of last firing. The test is carried out on small samples of porcelain drilled or cut from the body of a piece, which can be risky and disfiguring. For this reason the test is rarely used for dating finely-potted, high-fired ceramics. Other tests can be used to determine the composition of glazes and body materials, for comparison with the results of analyses carried out on reference specimens of known provenance. It is however widely held that at best, testing can only be of use when combined with other, more traditional, methods for helping to establish provenance. Such methods might including comparative techniques, expert opinion and the evaluation of written and verbal records, where these are available.

-Wikipedia
 

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