Japan and design in early Chinese export art

Magazine Antiques, Sept, 2000 by KEE IL CHOI, Jr.

In contrast to the limited pictorial possibilities offered by the beaker vase, the twelve- to fifteen-panel screens easily allowed for a monumental panoramic depiction of Europeans engaged in hunting, riding, and walking, some carrying guns and spears. The screens include a number of the same motifs found on the beaker vase; specifically the stems of two Western ships in foaming water anchor the composition at the extreme left, a town wall with a large arched gateway dominates the upper right, and a footbridge with two figures is just below. In addition, emerging from a clearing at the upper right on the screen in Plate III, and rendered in severe foreshortening, is a procession of European hunters, all carrying spears (P1. V), at the head of which is a mounted figure wearing a hat followed by a hatless parasol-bearer Trees and rockwork formations flank the procession, the one to the right separating it from the town gate.

The screens function well as decorative works of art that tell a story about Europeans arriving by ship and at leisure, hunting, riding, and walking. The painter of the beaker vase must have seen such a design and conflated it on his working surface, and thus it only makes sense when it is compared to the screens. He reduced the procession of hunters to a single mounted figure with an attendant shown passing through the gate, and immediately flanking the gate is a lone spear-bearer waiting to take his place in the now truncated procession. On the Amsterdam screen the procession is similarly condensed to a single mounted figure with an attendant, shown riding away from the town gate toward the left.

A much more successful translation onto porcelain of the composition on the screens is found on the circular food box decorated in famille verte enamels shown in Plates Villa and VIIIb. [7] In contrast to the beaker vase, the sides of this pot offered the porcelain decorator a continuous band on which to paint his subject. The orientation of the scene on the screens was difficult to reproduce on the food box because a scene on a round object has no real beginning or end. A section of seascape, with stylized foaming waves on which sail two ships, one Western and the other Chinese, forms the focal point of the design (P1. VIIIb). The landscape moves from either ship in either direction and presents several motifs and groups of figures we have seen before. Europeans are shown hunting deer and riding horseback as well as fishing, both from the shore and from boats. Once again we see a mounted figure followed by a parasol-bearer, particularly similar to those figures on the screen in Figure 1, and they are shown moving toward the hunters, ships, and the seascape and away from a European-style cityscape to the right (P1. VIIIa). As on the neck of the beaker vase and throughout the three screens, the motifs and figures are separated by tree and rockwork formations. A narrow band in a Greek-key motif above and a floral border below frame the scene in much the same way as do the precious objects, fan-shaped landscape reserves, and plants on the margins of the screens.