Guan or Fake ?
I, hopefully, believe this to be
a late seventeenth/early eighteenth century, Chinese Guan pottery, export fruitplate (the early Guan blue and white pottery being greatly prized by the newly established Ottoman empire) having read somewhere that late Guan, although inferior to the early handpainted, were made or modified for export to the domestic market and helped inspire the Iznik tradition. Indeed this piece has some early Iznik elements. It appears to be creamware backed, however, and reglazed. I'm hoping this could possibly have been done to strengthen the items 'pre-export' for transport, also some colour could have been added at this time which is the case with late Guan adding cobalt blue, turquoise, sage green and purple, finally bole red and emerald replacing the sage and purple. Production, although progressively of a lesser quality, continuing into the seventeenth century, before the second brother introduced his Ge pottery, soon after the Kutahya company took the market over as principal producer in the city of Iznik. Does anyone agree or have any thoughts on the subject of modification? On reflection I suppose my case for this piece is based on whether bole red could produce this shade of pink, the pale purple of the earlier period being unlikely although this pink I have yet to find mention of. I feel that the shade of green on this piece neither fits the early sage nor the later emerald, but I shall try to discover if it could have been achieved by a combination of either with the dark cobalt, probably the emerald.- - - -
Famille rose (known in Chinese as Fencai (粉彩) or Ruancai (軟彩, simplified 软彩), meaning 'soft colours', and later as Yangcai (洋彩), meaning 'foreign colours') was introduced during the reign of Kangxi (1654–1722), possibly around 1720. It used mainly pink or purple and remained popular throughout the 18th and the 19th centuries.
'Famille rose enamel ware allows a greater range of colour and tone than was previously possible, enabling the depiction of more complex images, including flowers, figures and insects.
It is made by drawing a sketch on the shaped clay, which is then covered with 'glassy white' (bo li bai), an opaque white enamel (lead arsenate), and painted in detail with the mixture of pigment and oil, before firing.'
..... To sum up my revised question after googling to discover 'Kangsi' and Familie Rose and Verte is
"Could the pink (rose) and green colours on this piece have been added mid- seventeenth century from the iron red of the '5 colours' period and reglazed to prepare the pottery for export further west" as by this time the Iznik tradition had established it's own larger home market and the Chinese style was now favoured further west, in France ( I like to fancy that this piece was brought to our shores by an escaped minor aristocrat from the French revolution or perhaps the revolutionist Madam La Farge eating her cake and crust from my fruit plate on holiday to Blackpool (joke). The practice of 'adding colours' had been re-established at this time as in the black background of Familie Noire.
