Taoist Immortals and Hsi Wang Mu, Three Famille Rose Plates, 1911

This is a set of three original 1911 color plates, Plates 211, 212 and 213 from Volume II of Gorer and Blacker's Chinese Porcelain and Hard Stones, sold together as one lot. What links them: famille rose figure and landscape vases. Plate 211: Vase, of baluster shape. Decorated with a continuous but uncommon design showing the eight Taoist immortals, some of them mounted upon lions; Chang Kuo, mounted upon a lion colored in a warm tint of underglaze brown, is offering a basket of fruit; painted in the enamels and other soft colors of the period. The book gives it to the Yung-ching period and records height 13 1/2 inches (34 cm); diameter 7 1/4 inches (18.5 cm). In the collection of A. J. David, Esq. Plate 212: Vase, cylindro-ovoid, large. Decorated with the delicate enamels of the famille rose upon a white ground of egg-shell porcelain; between tree-clad rocks of mottled green, outlined and hatched in black, stands the Taoist goddess Hsi Wang Mu, the graceful personification of eternal youth; the base underneath is covered with a green wash. The book gives it to the Yung-ching period and records height 19 3/4 inches (50 cm); diameter 9 1/2 inches (24 cm). Plate 213: Vase, cylindro-ovoid. Decorated with a continuous landscape enclosed in a wide border of dark blue enamel charged with flowers and edged with ju-i heads; the landscape shows trees with brown enamel stems and foliage of the later rose verte, pine, flowering peach, and shrubs; separated from the shoulder only by a rose line, and the handles represent chih-lung. The book gives it to the Kien-lung period and records height 13 1/2 inches (35 cm); diameter 6 1/2 inches (16.5 cm).

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.

Hung as a group with other plates from the same work, it builds into a decorative scheme with a common palette and a common hand. The three 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 three original sheets sold together as one lot, and the set is never split.

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