PORCELAIN DECORATED
technical skill. But a new decorative impulse was needed to subordinate glaze to decoration. When and how this impulse was imparted it is impossible to say precisely. The meagre evidence available points, however, to the close of the Sung era (circa 1200) as the probable date of the new departure. Chinese records, so far as they have hitherto been explored, are silent on the subject. H'siang, whose "Illustrated Catalogue" was compiled during the second half of the sixteenth century, describes eighty-two specimens of the wares most valued by connoisseurs at that period. Forty-three of these specimens are pieces manufactured during the Sung and Yuan dynasties. Among them there is not even one example of decoration with blue under the glaze. The first specimen of this sort mentioned by H'siang—a virtuoso whose reputation as a connoisseur obtained for him complimentary notice in the great Bibliographical Cyclopedia of Chien-lung (1736—1795)—belongs to the reign of the Ming Emperor Hsuan-tê (1426—1435). Even though it stood alone, such an item of evidence would suffice to show that, if porcelain decorated with blue under the glaze was manufactured before the Ming dynasty (1368), it did not succeed in establishing a title to be ranked among objets d'art. And when to the negative information afforded by H'siang's Catalogue is added the fact that the blue-and-white of the Sung and Yuan dynasties is absolutely ignored by other records, it seems impossible to avoid the conclusion that this branch of the art was still in a tentative and elementary condition.
Here the Japanese come to the student's aid. These enigmatical people, side by side with keen appreciation of the graceful and the beautiful, devel-
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