Page:Brinkley - China - Volume 1.djvu/24

 alike was mainly to preserve a catalogue of the most celebrated wares with their dates and places of manufacture and occasionally some meagre details of their nature. M. Julien, then, however conscientious as a linguist, could not fail to be misled and to mislead. He was followed, in 1875, by M. Jacquemart, an over-speculative connoisseur, who, great as was the debt of gratitude under which he placed collectors, wrote unfortunately in such a way as to mix the keramics of China, Korea, and Japan in confusion. Taking some of the choicest specimens of Chinese work, he allotted them to Korea or Japan; content to assume, in the one case, that Chinese artists never depicted Mandarins on their vases, and that, consequently, all vases thus decorated must be Japanese; and in the other, that any piece the decoration of which seemed to him to possess both Chinese and Japanese characteristics must come from a country between the two empires, namely, from Korea. Thus wherever Julien had led the public astray, Jacquemart helped to render the aberration permanent. One example is conspicuous:—Julien, falsely rendering a single word, said that the most esteemed variety of the Kuan-yao (Imperial ware) manufactured under the Sung dynasty (960-1279) was blue. Jacquemart thereupon wrote, "Le décor le plus ancien et le plus estimé au Céleste-Empire est celui en camaïeu bleu. Il s'exécute sur la pâte simplement séchée après le travail du tournage, et crue; on pose la couverte ensuite, on cuit, et dès lors la peinture devient inattaquable. Dans les temps les plus anciens, le cobalt n'était pas d'une pureté irréprochable; son plus ou moins grand éclat peut donc aider à fixer des dates approximatives. Pour prouver jusqu'à quel