Ruby Backed and Rose Ground Plates, Two Yung-ching Color Plates, 1911

This is a set of two original 1911 color plates, Plates 220 and 221 from Volume II of Gorer and Blacker's Chinese Porcelain and Hard Stones, sold together as one lot. What links them: egg shell and rose ground plates. Plate 220: Plate, one of a pair, egg-shell; and a second egg-shell saucer-shaped plate. The first is covered at the back with rouge d'or, that is, ruby, and has four borders: a narrow zone of pink lozenges, a wide band of mille-fleurs in colors upon a white ground, another border of lozenges, and a tender green ground leading to a pink mosaic border with touches of yellow. The second, also ruby-backed, has a wide canary color border of mosaic outlined in faint tones of red and green, cut by three reserves containing colored flowers on a white ground. and records diameter 8 3/4 inches (22.2 cm). Plate 221: Pair of large rose-color plates. The rims show a brocade pattern charged with flowers on a swastika ground in one and a rice diaper in the other. An aster as a rose rosette and other flowers on the border enclose four white panels, bordered in one with yellow, in the other with another color; the finest enamels of the famille rose. The book gives it to the Yung-ching period and records diameter 21 1/4 inches (54 cm). In the collection of A. E. Cumberbatch, Esq.

The sheets come from Chinese Porcelain and Hard Stones, the two volume work by the London dealer Edgar Gorer and the writer J. F. Blacker, published by Bernard Quaritch of 11 Grafton Street, New Bond Street, in 1911 in an edition of one thousand numbered copies. 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.

What gives these plates their standing is the quality of the collections they record. Pieces illustrated here passed through the great Edwardian cabinets, and several are now in museums, so the book is a photographic record of where this material sat a century ago.

Collectors of Chinese ceramics, of early color printing and of Edwardian book illustration all look for these plates, and they work equally well in an interior scheme as in a collection. 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. Slight wear at the corners of one of the two sheets. Brown marks on one of the two sheets.