Famille Verte Square Bottle with Mandarin Scenes, Kang-he, Plate 1911

This antique color plate is Plate 48 of Gorer and Blacker's Chinese Porcelain and Hard Stones, 1911. It shows a quadrangular vase or square bottle with a mottled green neck and a seeded green body, with figure reserves. Each side holds two reserves showing a mandarin receiving a present, drinking, watching painting and chess, riding, and worshipping a Buddha, set on a seeded green ground of flowers and butterflies. The beaker neck has tings in blue, white, yellow and red on mottled green. Gorer and Blacker describe it as early Kang-he period and record it in the Salting Collection; height 19 5/8 inches (50 cm), width 5 3/4 inches (15 cm).

Chinese Porcelain and Hard Stones was issued in London by Bernard Quaritch in 1911, in two large quarto volumes limited to one thousand numbered copies. Edgar Gorer and J. F. Blacker wrote the text, which runs in English and French, and the two hundred and fifty four plates were printed in color from photographs of the pieces themselves rather than drawn by hand. This sheet is one of them. The plates are color collotypes, and the book records that it was produced and printed by the Menpes Printing and Engraving Company of London and Watford.

Gorer and Blacker chose the showpieces of the trade: tall black ground vases, green ground beakers, figures and animals, many of them from named private collections in Britain and America. The plates are a record of Western taste in Chinese ceramics in 1911 as much as of the objects themselves.

Even age toning. Scattered light foxing in the margin. All four corners complete. Several larger brown marks.

This is an original antique print, not a modern reproduction. This item is sold unframed.