Mile-Posts and Relationships
World Ceramics from the Auckland Museum

TREVOR BAYLISS

In this short article I am going to wander through the ceramic collection of the Auckland Museum, illustrate an object or group, and write about what it says to me.

Let us begin straight away with this lidded pot from the Chinese T'ang Dynasty (A.D. 615-980).  You will see that it is a very disciplined work: the forms are rigidly controlled and the glaze is simple and severe.  The glaze is feldspathic, high-fired, and the body light cream stoneware.  Does the form remind you of somewhere else?  Of Rome perhaps?  Sure enough, that is where this shape originated.  For centuries Rome had imported goods from China - eight thousand miles and more along the silk route.  Ideas could not fail to make the return journey.

Aurel Stein, the exploring English civil servant, writes fascinatingly of his travels in the early part of the century in the areas above India through which the silk route passed.  He describes finding a Chinese custom house of the third century, its papers still intact, written in many ancient languages.  And the seal on each roll? - the Grecian goddess Pallas Athene.

Quite reasonable then for a 'drawing-board' Roman form to be adopted by a Chinese potter.

From Japan comes this large and handsome Onda pot. Made of a grey stoneware, it is decorated by poured black and white slip and then covered with a clear feldspathic glaze.

Onda is a small pottery village at the head of a valley in Northern Kyushu. The village cloaks a clear mountain stream and day and night one hears the gentle thudding of large tree-trunk pounders pivoted all along the stream which continuously fills the hollowed trunks so that the weight of water swings down one end, empties its load and allows the other end to smack down its giant pestle end into a hollow filled with clay. These Onda potters work in the traditional Japanese folk manner using wood-fired kilns, albeit assisted with oil.

Traditional Japanese pottery has a history comparable in length with that of China. The development of the tea ceremony and an influx of Korean potters at the end of the sixteenth century wars saw the establishment of many of the kilns still operating, such as Onda, Karatsu and Hagi, in addition to the famous kilns like Set, Bizen and Tamba which have operated since the eighth century.

Through the centuries all these Mingei kilns have potted in the style of the Sung potters, as is plain from the two displays in the Auckland Museum's Asian Hall.

Two groups of pots have been photographed together so that we can examine their relationships.  At the bottom of the first group is a Chinese Northern Sung celadon, of a dark sharp green with a lotus pattern crisply incised. The small neat foot typical of Sung bowls thrusts the bowl curve up from the horizontal surface.

In the middle of this group is a large Korean wine ewer of the same period (twelfth or thirteenth century). Korea was often under Chinese domination and this pot illustrates the contact. The celadon glaze is a typical uniquely Korean smoky green, with the design not brushed on but inlaid with black and white clays: a technique peculiar to Korea.

Just behind the celadon bowl is a Chinese Ch'ingpai glazed ewer of the Sung Dynasty. This could be translated as 'heavenly blue' and indeed it often is.

To the right of this ewer is the Thai version. Thailand in the thirteenth century came under the Mongol regime in China, and it is believed today that refugee potters from China came through Annam and set up kilns in Sawankhalok and Sukhotai, the ancient capitals. Until the Khmer wars caused the collapse of these cities a thriving industry produced charming unsophisticated versions of Sung ceramics such as this Thai ewer.

The T'ang (A.D. 615-960) figure, shown in the background right, is a court official, one of the millions of 'tomb figures' produced for the important and wealthy dead. Made of a light buff earthenware, the serene official robes are covered with the typical running glazes of the T'ang coloured with iron red and copper green.

Look at the Persian ninth century pot to the left of the figure. This is surely a case of trade pressure - camel loads of Chinese glazed pots arriving along the silk route and the Persian potter being forced to produce a similar ware or go bankrupt. This piece was excavated from Samarra.

The Ming (A.D. 1368-1644) underglaze blue stem bowl, centre, has many of the qualities of the porcelain of the period. Crisply thrown and covered with a matt white glaze, the blue is soft and the drawing (not painting) is deft.

The Japanese borrowed this type of ceramic in the sixteenth century and made it their own. Around Arita many kilns have operated ever since. Arita blue and white has competed with China in the markets of Europe while Kakiemon, such as the enamelled bowl centre left, surpassed the Chinese version in brilliance of colour.

By the year 1726, imports of blue and white porce1ain through the Port of London alone had reached the staggering figure of 2,000,000 a year. What this did to the potters of Europe still-chained by their technology to brown bodies and lead glazes can only be imagined.

The Dutch Delft bottle, behind and to the left, in the style of Nan Li, shows what they did. Tin oxide mixed with the clear ead glaze turned it opaque white covering the brown !arthenware body and allowing the cobalt blue design to be painted over the glaze, not under as in the Chinese porcelain.

It is interesting to see from this pot how having to paint on a dry powdery glaze surface forced a different painting technique, one charged brush, one stroke, and then recharge the brush. Although many tin glaze wares were decorated in Chinoiserie style, the national styles in fashion were used. There is on display in the Museum a marvellous bowl that has on the outside Chinoiserie willow trees and diaper patterns, and on the inside a sketch of a two-masted barque complete with flags and the inscription 'Success to the Whalley' - John Bull in association with John Chinaman.

The English Castor-ware pot purchased by the Disney Art Trust for the Dominion Museum is a rare and beautiful example. This ware appeared in many places in Europe after the Romans retreated to their homelands. The potters, after centuries of potting in the Roman way, making functional red wares of machine-like quality, return to their Celtic traditions while retaining largely he Roman forms. The decoration on this pot is certainly Celtic: but it, is the technique that is so stunning. This is poured slip. In simple terms the potter holds the bare, nearly dry pot in his hand, a jug of creamy clay in his right, and pours on the design of running deer. Incredible skill is needed. I would have difficulty in pouring the dots!

The platter and posset pot reproduced below are English slipware of the seventeenth century, made of traditional red and buff English clays. They have had the beautiful fluid designs poured on them with white slip and covered with a soft lead glaze. These wares show no trace of outside influence. This ware is contemporary with Ming sixteenth and seventeenth century porcelain: or put another way, at about the same development as third century Chinese.

The second group is of pots that have little or no relationship with each other: but it could be said that each represents a mile-post in ceramic history.

Front left is a small T'ang vase of distinctly Grecian form. Why? When the great Greek Alexander completed his Odyssey and conquered North-West India he initiated a fusion of Greek sculpture and the Buddhist faith that we know as the Graeco Buddhist school and the figures of Buddha that are known as Gandharan.

Some of these Buddhist Maitreya figures carried in the left hand a small Grecian unguent bottle. As Buddhism spread through Tibet and ultimately to China the figure style continued and must have come to the notice of Chinese potters who proceeded to throw on their wheels the Chinese version of this bottle.

The battle charger at the back belongs to around the fourth century A.D. This marvellous figure represents a very different technique from the T'ang sculptor who in a rather 'flashy' way portrayed the straining muscles and flaring nostrils of the same breed of horse.

On First Millennium bronzes and drawings the horse is a much smaller creature - the Sino-Mongolian horse - but Chinese officials going about their business through West Turkestan, now known as Fergana, clapped their eyes on a marvellous breed of Arab-Persian horses. In 102 B.C., China inevitably obtained these horses to use as battle chargers, and it is this Fergan horse that we see.

The fine jug by Bernard Leech, left back, links up three great developments in pottery. Its style is medieval English - a statement of leech's admiration for this fine pottery. Its ash glaze and stoneware body is oriental and is consequent on Leech's involvement in 1920 with the Yanagi folk revival in Japan and his association with the young artist potters Shoji Hamada, Kanjiro Kawai and Kenkichi Tomimoto. Leech is also the leading figure in the development of New Zealand studio pottery, and probably its biggest single influence.

The vase back right was made in the imperial kilns of China during the reign of Chien Sung (A.D. 1736-95). It is a beautiful object and a tremendous technical achievement. All the colours, pink, copper red and green, are obtained from the one source - copper - which when oxidised turns green, and when reduced i.e. fired without face oxygen in the kiln turns plum red. To produce these colours on the one pot requires the most brilliant kiln management. The glaze is known as Peach Bloom.

It is a far cry to Josiah Wedgwood, the English industrial potter and creator (for a wager) of a copy of the famed Barberini vase in the 'basalt' ware popular in the second half of the eighteenth century. This vase (middle right) is not one of the early edition, painstakingly trimmed and shaded after the initial sprigging of the white bas-relief on the black body.

Finally, in the foreground, we come to a plate in English Worcestor soft paste porcelain known as the Sir Joshua Reynolds pattern. Rococo-cum-Chinese in design, it is not the style to set a studio potter's pulse athrobbing! But the quality is there, the glowing soft colours melting into the lustrous lead glaze. This is a worthy representative of fifty years of European soft paste porcelain, produced by mixing powdered glass with white earthenware - another attempt by resident potters to match that flood of jewel-like porcelain from China.

There are over four thousand ceramic pieces in the collection of the Auckland Institute and Museum. These pots and figures cover most of the great ceramic movements and developments: English ceramics; Chinese ceramics; Asian areas associated with China throughout its history and therefore influenced by China, Korea, Japan, Thailand, Annam, Persia and Turkey; the pottery of the Pacific including Fiji and New Guinea; the pottery of the Americas; African pottery; Greek and Roman pottery; studio pottery. The Museum has endeavoured over the last fifteen years to concentrate on the English and Asian ceramics. And in purchasing and displaying the objects the Ceremics Department has tried to make it easy for visitors to refer from one piece to another: to go from the Sung case to the Japanese Mingei and to the Korean and Thai displays, see the obvious resemblances and perhaps pursue the reasons for this similarity. A hundred such cross-references are possible: T'ang display to Persia; Ming display to English Delft; Victorian iron-stone to Chinese trade porcelain, and so on.