Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 8.djvu/147

 decoration to relieve the impure white of his porcelain field, whereas the Nabeshima keramist made his milk-white glaze a distinctive feature and subordinated the decoration to this special excellence. Arguing from the fact that the progress of the keramic art at Arita and Okawachi was on the whole uniform, the amateur will be prepared to learn that the earliest Nabeshima porcelains exhibited the same paucity of enamels as their Imari contemporaries; red, gold, green, and light blue (over the glaze) were the colours chiefly employed. Purple, yellow, and the other enamels enumerated above, seem to have come into use from the close of the seventeenth, or the beginning of the eighteenth century.

Seeing that blue under the glaze played such a large rôle at the Arita factories, the student is led to anticipate that porcelain showing decoration of this class only would be common among specimens of ancient Imari-yaki. But in truth very few large examples of Old Japanese blue-and-white are to be found. In plates, bowls, saké bottles, and other household utensils, pieces of great beauty are sometimes found, the blue of which is scarcely inferior to the richest colour obtained by the potters of the Middle Kingdom. This is especially true of the Goku-hin-yaki. With the exception of such classes, however, blue sous couverte is almost invariably associated with enamel decoration. Ewers for placing outside or on a verandah, flower-pots, and dishes make up the total of large blue-and-white specimens, and it will be understood that keramists seldom put their best work into such pieces. Big pots with covers—called in Japan Jinuo (dust vessels)—so many of which do duty as the highest types of "Old Japan" in European collec-