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Extract from the November 2008 Magazine
November 2008 Magazine Pages 24-25 'NO WOMEN, NO DOGS'

Canton-decorated, 19th Century Chinese Porcelain

by David Battie
It was inevitable that the Chinese with their burgeon-ing economy and widening perspective would begin to seek out works of art that had left China in the pillages of the 19th century. Oddly, they are buying back their export wares of that period too, mostly Canton. Why Canton?
In the 18th century, the Chinese, nervous as ever of the 'foreign devils', 'big noses' or 'ghosts' as they vari-ously called Europeans, restricted their presence on mainland China to a strip only 100 yards deep beside the Pearl River from which they might trade. To make it doubly difficult, no ships could tie up there - that had to be done down river at Whampoa to where all goods were transhipped. The edict of the title of this article was to prevent any troubles breaking out between the sailors over women; the dogs are more of a puzzle -perhaps no betting on dog fights.

November 2008 Magazine Page 28Figure 10. A rare mark and period brush pot with a hybrid Canton/Xianfeng figures/poems decoration, 4½in., six character seal mark of Xianfeng (1851-61) (figure 9iii).

The 'factories', as the various countries' depots were known, were only trading posts, and negotiations took place between the ship's supercargo (representative) and the Chinese 'hong' (a trusted, wealthy individual, whose title then transferred to the factories themselves). He it was who finalised the deal with supercargo and the Chinese merchant. When coloured enamel decoration first appeared for export, it was executed in Jingdezhen, where the porcelain was made, migrating to Canton in the early 18th century and coinciding with the introduction of pink famille-rose, the colour that was to be a feature of the Canton style. The Canton style in America is called 'Mandarin'; both describe a class of loosely-related, brightly-enamelled and gilt wares. I fear that after a century of confusion it is now too late to attempt to persuade dealers and col-lectors to accept a new terminology. This article will refer to the whole group as 'Canton'.
Towards the end of the 18th century, the Dutch and English East India Companies, which had dominated the trade in porcelain with China, withdrew. With most of the market gone, the remaining traders saw a de-cline in the quality of the decoration. Into the breach sailed the US; quality dramatically improved and new shapes appeared. The growing sales to the American market encouraged new designs and of a higher quality. Certainly, many of the shapes show obvious Western influence. The US had little with which to trade and their main export was ginseng, of which the Chinese could not get enough.
One major change was that of plate forms. Instead of a flat condiment rim which had been current for over a century, the rim developed a depression, that and the cavetto, forming a double curve.
One of the most consistent features of any 'open' ceramic object - plate, dish, saucer - is the foot rim. In these plates, it disappears; the base is turned as usual, but it leaves no U-shaped foot as it joins the cavetto without a break (figure 2a). Significantly, the depressed rim plates are far more prevalent in the US than they are in the UK and many of the designs on them are not usually encountered in Europe, figure 1 for example. This atrophied foot is most often, as is usual with Chinese porcelain, burnt-orange (figure 2a) and unusally, may have kiln grit adhering (figure 2b), rarely a feature earlier.