Chinese armorial porcelain

Magazine Antiques, August, 2003 by Alfred Mayor

Thirty years ago David Sanctuary Howard published what turned out to be volume 1 of a book about Chinese armorial porcelain commissioned by Western buyers. Until then the subject had been his hobby It then became his profession when he opened an antiques shop in London specializing in heraldic objects. Volume 2, just published, records and illustrates an additional 1,380 armorial services. The index in this volume lists more than 4,000 services, encompassing both volumes. Volume 1 has long been out of print, which is a pity since volume 2 has many cross-references to it. Howard hopes to republish the first volume, this time with color illustrations, in 2006.

To locate a given service in this prodigious agglomeration Howard has devised a number of ingenious tools. There are an index of services by the names of families and individuals for whom they were made; an index of mottoes that appear on the services and the names of the owners, with the caveat that more than one family may have used a given motto; and there is an illustrated analysis of rim styles that establishes the combined letter and number code by which the services are grouped and illustrated in both volumes.

Among the fourteen appendixes are lists of the governors of Bombay from 1710 to 1810, the directors of the South Sea Company in 1719 and 1720, the names of the lords mayor of London from 1700 to 1835, and an analysis by county of families with armorial services. The author's interest in statistics, developed while he was at boarding school, has stood him in good stead.

Dating a service combines a precise knowledge of heraldry with a comparison of the rim with similar rims on datable plates or in engravings. Since an armorial service proved that its owner had "arrived," it had to be on the cuffing edge of fashion. Thus, the designs of the rims changed rapidly and were copied on nonarmorial services, helping to date them as well.

The Chinese painters were meticulous copyists of the bookplates, drawings, or watercolors of arms provided them. However, they were not schooled in the niceties of heraldry with the result that colors were sometimes incorrect. The author cites the best-known example as the series of services made for the Dobree family of Guernsey in the mid-eighteenth century On the first three attempts blue and gold rather than red and white were used on the shield "after which an exasperated member of the family must have coloured the central arms on a drawing or bookplate and added the words 'red' and 'green' to the mantling by way of additional instruction. The resulting fourth service (P21) copies the word 'red' onto the porcelain while painting that section of the mantling pale blue, while 'green' is written under two areas of rose mantling!"

Nearly two centuries later, about 1930, a parallel confusion resulted in the arms of the Corporation of Lloyds being rendered with the inscription in a banner below proclaiming "HUSNM." The colors of the coat of arms are all wrong, meaning that Lloyds supplied a black-and-white original, which the company used on its letterhead beginning in 1927, a year after its arms were granted. Unfortunately the sample of letterhead sent to China was used so it was complete with the sort of reference letters used in English business correspondence--in this case "HUSNM," standing for a person whose surname began with H from the United States, and the initials of the phrase non-maritime, for the type of insurance to be discussed in the letter.

In the nineteenth century Chinese porcelain became less popular in England in view of high import duties. When replacements in existing sets became necessary a number of English and European factories rose to the challenge. The Samson firm in Paris employed painters of a very high quality, and some of their best work continued to be labeled Chinese until the middle of the twentieth century The enterprising factory also successfully produced "Meissen," "Sevres," and other types of porcelain. The molds for these survived into the late 1970s, when Howard visited their peaceful factory near s "surrounding a faded courtyard with flowering shrubs climbing the walls."

Howard also explores the role of the Swedish East India Company in supplying armorial porcelain to Scotland, which is logical enough considering the proximity of Gothenberg, Sweden, to Scotland. In another chapter he summarizes the market for armorial porcelain over the last century (a feast of statistics for the addicted). Finally there is a succinct and invaluable lesson in the rules applying to the composition of coats of arms, illustrated with examples of all the variables. This chapter in a slightly modified form appeared in volume 1, and quite rightly has been repeated here for those who only have volume 2.

Howard claims that an average of one or two new armorial services turn up each week, thanks in part to the Internet and the illustrations it instantly provides of services at auction all over the world. Thus he has revised his previous estimate of the total number of armorial services made from about five thousand to nearer six thousand, totaling two or three million individual objects. Dare one suggest the possibility of volume 3?