Apple Green and Sage Green Glazes, Two Chinese Monochrome Plates, 1911

This is a set of two original 1911 color plates, Plates 167 and 170 from Volume II of Gorer and Blacker's Chinese Porcelain and Hard Stones, sold together as one lot. What links them: green glaze monochrome groups. Plate 167: Vase or jar, ovoid, with an apple-green glaze applied over a white crackle surface. Apple-green glaze over a white crackle surface; on the rim a narrow border of plain white crackle is reserved, from which the glaze, in a soft tone of green, falls with increasing thickness to the base, where a band of darker color indicates the accumulation of glaze. A second piece, a bottle, coral-red, shows the application of iron-red glaze upon a white glazed ground, the color imitating a branch of red coral. The book gives it to the Ming period and records height 8 1/4 inches (21 cm); diameter 7 3/8 inches (18.7 cm). Plate 170: Group of three vases. A single glaze of a rare green color, perhaps nearest to sage-green on the gourd-shaped vases. The graceful vase, of unguentarium form, has a white rim at the top, possibly reduced in width by grinding on the wheel. The two vases, of double gourd shape, have a ring of dark brown round the mouth; the bottom rim is unglazed and the base covered with a green glaze; these pieces are very finely crackled. The book gives it to the Yung-ching period and records height 8 1/4 inches (20.6 cm); diameter 2 3/8 inches (6.2 cm), the book giving a size for each piece shown. From the collection formed by Richard Bennett, Esq., D.L.

Chinese Porcelain and Hard Stones, by Edgar Gorer and J. F. Blacker, was published in London by Bernard Quaritch in 1911 in two volumes with two hundred and fifty four color plates, and these sheets are among them, from Volume II. The plates are color collotypes, a photographic process that reproduces continuous tone without a visible dot screen, which is why the glazes keep their depth on paper.

The book appeared at the height of the Edwardian passion for Chinese porcelain, when English and American collections were being formed at speed and a dealer's catalog could shape taste. R. L. Hobson of the British Museum attacked Gorer's attributions in print when the work appeared, and later scholarship has revised many attributions of this kind, which is part of what makes the volumes interesting to read now.

A sheet of this size frames well at about forty by fifty centimeters and suits a study, a hallway or a dining room where its color can be seen close to. The two sheets are the same size and were printed by the same hand, so they hang as one group.

These are original antique prints, not modern reproductions. They are two original sheets sold together as one lot, and the set is never split.

Even age toning throughout. Light foxing in the margins of one of the two sheets. Slight wear at the corners of one of the two sheets.