Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 19.djvu/657

Rh ANCIENT MEXICAN, ETC.] POTTERY 633 Towards the end of the 1 8th century many imitations were made of the Wedgwood cameo ware by different English manufacturers, and even at Sevres it was copied in porce lain, though with original French designs. None, how ever, are equal to Wedgwood s work, either in beauty of design or delicacy of execution. Modern Until quite recently little or no pottery of any artistic merit has work. t&amp;gt; een produced in England during the present century, partly owing to the absurd notion that pottery is a sort of inferior porcelain, and should be made to resemble it as much as possible, and also very largely on account of the invention in the 18th century of a process (described below) for printing patterns under the glaze, so as to avoid the labour of painting them by hand. Other modern so-called improvements of manufacture have done much to destroy all true art in English pottery ; such are the too finely ground and artificial mixtures of different materials, the great use of the mould in preference to the potter s wheel, and, most fatal of all, the fact that, when the pottery is thrown on the wheel, it is afterwards handed over to a workman who turns it on a lathe and rubs it down with glass-paper, as if it were a block of wood, thus remov ing all the surface put on the vessel by the touch of the thrower s hand. Indeed, the great manufactory of Sevres has now so com pletely lost all sense of the natural and reasonable treatment of plastic clay that the larger vases are cast whole by being poured in a fluid state into a mould, a method reasonable enough for iron or bronze but ludicrously inappropriate to plastic clay. Some few manufacturers have, however, of late tried to produce pottery shaped and decorated in a more natural way. The Lambeth pot tery produces a good deal of excellent work, especially ware covered (after the Japanese fashion) with one brilliant enamel colour. Mr William De Morgan of Chelsea and Merton has perhaps made the greatest advances of all, having rediscovered the way to make and use the beautiful thickly-glazed blues and greens of the old Persian ware, and also the fine silver and copper lustres of Gubbio and Spain. He uses these splendid colours in designs conceived and drawn with the old spirit, but of sufficient originality to make them a real stage in the development of ceramic art, not a mere archaeological revival of styles and methods which have long ceased to have a significance and life of their own. Sad though the confession is, it must be admitted that, to find a class of pottery designed with lines of natural beauty and pro duced in accordance with the simple requirements of plastic clay, it is, for the most part, necessary to go, not to the centres of our boasted 19th-century civilization with its countless devices for turn ing out work cheaply and rapidly, but rather to the humble work shops of more primitive races, among whom the commercial spirit has not yet destroyed all inborn feeling for true art and beauty. Literature. For English pottery, see Jewitt, Ceramic Art of Great Britain, 1877 ; Solon, Old English Potter, 1883 ; Owen, Ceramic Art in Bristol, 1873 ; Wallis and Bemrose, Pottery of Derbyshire, 1870 ; Mayer, Art of Pottery in Liverpool, 1855 ; Binns, Potting in Worcester from 1751 to 1851, 18(35 ; Church, Catalogue of English Pottery, 1870 ; some of these works deal more with porce lain than pottery. SECTION XV. ANCIENT MEXICAN, PERUVIAN, &amp;lt;fcc. texico The pottery of ancient Mexico and Peru, certainly older than the Spanish conquests in America, and possibly dating from a much more remote age, has many points of interest. Large quantities in good preservation have been discovered in the tombs of chiefs and other important persons of those once powerful and (in a somewhat barbaric way) artistic races. Much of their pottery is grotesque and even hideous in shape, modelled in the forms of semi-human monsters ; it is often made of a hard black clay, well burned, something like the early black wares of Etruria. Another kind is grace ful and natural in shape, formed with great taste and skill on the potter s wheel. Many of the forms seem to have been sug gested by vessels made of gourds. The decoration is very curious ; many of the simple painted patterns with geometrical de signs and hatched lines call to mind the earliest type of painted FlG - 66. Ancient Peruvian ves- decoration on the archaic pot tery of Mycenae and the Greek islands. The clay is fine in texture and has a slight surface-gloss, apparently the re sult of mechanical polishing. Fig. 66 shows a typical form. 1 The British Museum has a good collection of this ware. The natives of Arizona and other uncivilized races of America even now make simple pottery decorated with taste and true decorative feeling. SECTION XVI. POTTERY AND PORCELAIN OF CHINA AND JAPAN. In the methods of treatment employed in China and Japan the usual distinctions between pottery (earthenware) and porcelain (kaolinic ware) are not always observed. In many cases these two different materials are treated in exactly the same way and decorated after the same fashion. It will therefore be convenient to describe them both together. History of Chinese Porcelain. The chronological arrange- History ment of Chinese wares is a matter of great difficulty. Many of Chin- of the professedly historical records of the Chinese them-f 5 ? selves are quite untrustworthy ; as with all other arts, they have claimed for the manufacture of porcelain an antiquity far beyond the actual facts of the case. This exaggerated estimate of the antiquity of Chinese porcelain was for a long time supported by the supposed discovery in Egypt of certain small bottles made of real porcelain, and in scribed with Chinese characters, which were said to have been found in tombs at Thebes dating as early as 1800 B.C. The fact, however, that they are inscribed with quotations from Chinese poets of the 8th century A.D., and have characters of a comparatively modern form, shows that the Avhole story of their discovery is a fraud. The only native work which gives trustworthy information on the development of Chinese porcelain is a History of the Manufactory of King-te-chin, compiled from earlier records in 1815 by a native official, which was translated into French by M. Julien, under the title Histoire de la Fabri cation de la Porcelaine Chinoise (Paris, 1856). Accord ing to this work, the manufacture of pottery is said to have commenced in 2697 B.C., and that of porcelain during the Han dynasty, 206 B.C. to 25 A.D. The Tsin dynasty (265-419 A.D.) was remarkable for its blue porcelain, and the Suy dynasty (581-618 A.D.) for its fine green ware. One of the most celebrated kinds of porcelain was that made about 954 A.D., deep sky-blue in colour, very glossy in texture, extremely thin, and sounding musically when struck. Even small fragments of it are treasured up by the Chinese, and set like jewels. Most dynasties seem to have been famed for a special variety of porcelain. The earlier sorts appear not to have been decorated with painting, but were all of one rich colour. Decorative painting did not apparently come into general use before the Yuen dynasty of Mongols (1260-1368), and was brought to great perfection under the Mings (1368-1644). The porcelain of the last-named dynasty is classified in periods, four of which (from 1426 to 1567) were greatly esteemed. Probably few specimens of Chinese porcelain known in Europe are earlier in date than the time of Kang-he, the second emperor of the Tsing dynasty (1661-1722). During all periods Chinese potters were constantly in the habit of copying earlier styles and of forging their marks, so that very little reliance can be placed on internal evidence. Indeed, the forgeries often deceive the Chinese collectors of old porcelain. Manufacture of Porcelain. It is made from two sub- Manu- stances, &quot;pe-tun-tse&quot; and &quot;kao-lin&quot;; the latter is a facture. white pasty substance derived from the decomposition of felspathic rocks such as granite. It is a hydrated silicate of alumina (Al 2 O 3 .2SiO 2 + 2H 2 O), and derives its name from a hill near King-tih-chin, where it was first found (see KAOLIN). The precise nature of pe-tun-tse is not 1 See Rivero and You Tschudi, Antiguedades Peruanas, 1851. XIX. 80