Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 8.djvu/148

 tions, sometimes have designs in blue sous couverte only; but the inferior quality of their pâte and glaze, and the muddy tone of their blue are fatal blemishes. It is to the products of the Hirado workshops that the connoisseur must go for the best and most valuable examples of Old Japanese blue-and-white. He will there find close fine biscuit, pure white glaze, and blue which, if not so deep or strong as the most esteemed Chinese colour, is of unsurpassed delicacy and æsthetic beauty. During the comparatively short period of its existence the Kame-yama factory, near Nagasaki, turned out many fairly good pieces of blue-and-white, essentially of the plate-and-bowl type. But the connoisseur should not experience any difficulty in distinguishing these, for, as compared with Imari ware, their pâte, though free from grit, is more chalky, their glaze even less pure in tone, and their blue colour emphatically wanting in richness and body. It is further to be observed that the decorative designs on Imari blue-and-white porcelain were nearly always of the formal type, as diapers, scrolls, and so forth, whereas the subjects taken by the Hirado potters were chiefly pictorial,—landscapes, trees, figures, and flowers.

Neither at Arita nor at Okawachi was the art of producing crackle successfully practised by the porcelain manufacturers. Yet in old pieces of Imari ware, both enamelled and blue-and-white, craquelé is sometimes found. The pâte of such specimens is always much softer than ordinary porcelain biscuit: it was evidently a special mixture of clays. But there is no evidence to show whether the object of thus mixing different varieties of material was to produce crackle, or whether the composition, and therefore also the