CHINA
PORCELAIN DECORATED
and the lustre of the glaze. Many varieties of red are found on porcelains thus decorated, sang de bauf, ruby, bean-blossom, reddish brown, liver colour and maroon. It is maintained, however, by Chinese col- lectors—to whose verdict the foreign connoisseur must, of course, bow in such matters—that the potter’s highest aim was to produce a colour combin- ing brilliancy and strength with softness and liquidity. According to this canon, what the amateur has to look for is the red of fresh blood or of a ripe cherry, and his standard may be that the purer and more dazzling the tone, the choicer the specimen. In old-time descriptions of such decoration sharp defini- tion of the red design’s contours is spoken of as a special tour de force, the sudden juxtaposition of the snow-white ground tending to give salience-and em- phasis to the decoration. But in some examples highly prized and plainly deserving the esteem in which they are held, a slight clouding of red ap- pears at the edges and in the interstices of the design, and the result is soft and charming. It need scarcely be said that no variety of this ware is choicer than that in which the red is of the bean- blossom (or ‘ peach-blow”) type. Moreover, al- though the colour does not belong to any of the very rarest types — fresh-blood, ruby, ripe-cherry, or peach-bloom — but falls below them in strength and brilliancy, the specimen may still have claims to a prominent place in any collection. A _ dis- tinctly impure muddy red alone condemns the ware. In the great majority of really choice examples the red shows dappling and spotting with transparent green, varying from emerald to the colour of pow- dered tea-leaf (chamo). This feature is considered
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