Chinese Art, Volume 2

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H.M. Stationery Office, 1909 - 313 pages
 

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Page 8 - HM's Dockyard, Portsmouth ; Examiner in Building Construction, Science and Art Department, South Kensington. With numerous Illustrations. Medium 8vo. 16s. RIVINGTON'S COURSE OF BUILDING CONSTRUCTION. Notes on Building Construction. Arranged to meet the requirements of the Syllabus of the Science and Art Department of the Committee of Council on Education, South Kensington.
Page xxiii - Their word for earthenware is wa, the character for which was originally the picture of a rounded tile. " Porcelain was certainly invented in China. This is acknowledged, as it were, by the English adoption of the word "china" as equivalent to porcelain; and even in Persia, where Chinese porcelain has been known and imitated for centuries, the only country to which an independent invention has been plausibly attributed by some writers, the word chini has a similar connotation. For the creation of...
Page 100 - It is not embroidery, though so very like it, for tapestry is not worked upon what is really a web, having both warp and woof, but upon a series of closely set, fine strings.
Page 8 - Hard paste, containing only natural elements in the composition of the body and the glaze. 2. Soft paste, where the body is an artificial combination of various materials, agglomerated by the action of fire, in which the compound called a frit has been used as a substitute for a natural rock. No soft paste porcelain, as here defined, has ever been made in China, so that it need not be referred to further. All Chinese porcelain is of the hard paste variety. The body consists essentially of two elements...
Page 71 - The art of enamelling seems to have been invented at a very remote date in Western Asia, and to have penetrated to Europe, as far west even as Ireland, in the early centuries of the Christian era, but there is no evidence of its having traveled eastwards to China till much later.
Page 88 - ... made to imperial order. Although imitations have continued to be made, nothing of real quality in this style was produced after the termination of the reign of Ch'ien Lung in 1795. The method has always been looked upon by the Chinese as in alien taste ; a writer of 1782 (quoted by Bushell) remarks, "They are only fit for use as ornaments of ladies' apartments — not at all for the chaste furniture of the library of a simple scholar." Enamels of this kind were also made, with characteristic...
Page 8 - T'ang Ying tells us that in his time the glaze of the highest class of porcelain was composed of ten measure of the petuntse puree with one measure of the liquid lime. Seven or eight ladles of petuntse with three or two ladles of lime were used for the glazes of the middle class. With petuntse and lime in equal proportions, or with lime predominating, the glaze was 'described by him as fit only for...
Page 71 - ... decorated, with shallow cells sometimes called cloisons, but this term is more correctly employed to designate the bands themselves. These are then filled with the appropriate enamel colours, ground to a fine powder, moistened and tightly packed into their respective cells. "The piece," says Dr. SW Bushell, "is usually fired in the open courtyard, protected only by a primitive cover of iron network, the charcoal fire being regulated by a number of men standing round with large fans in their hands.
Page 8 - ... existence. The Chinese delight in literary research, as much as they fear to disturb the rest of the dead by digging in the ground, so that we have no tangible proof, so far, of the occurrence of true porcelain, and can only hope for the future appearance of an actual specimen of early date. Still we may reasonably accept the conclusion of the best native scholarship that porcelain was first made in the Han dynasty, without trying, as Stanislas Julien has tried on very insufficient grounds, to...
Page 8 - XXXVI, XXXVII, which were doubtless fashioned in the Liu-li Ch'ang factory at Peking in the Ming dynasty. PORCELAIN Porcelain has been broadly defined as the generic term employed to designate all kinds of pottery to which an incipient vitrification has been imparted by firing. This translucent pottery may be divided into two classes: i. Hard paste, containing only natural elements in the composition of the body and the glaze. 2. Soft paste, where the body is an artificial combination of various...

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