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About Antique Chinese Porcelain Late Ming,
The porcelain of the Ming Dynasty of China (1368-1644 CE) benefitted, as did other arts, from the economic success of the 15th century CE, in particular, and the consequent surge in demand for quality handcraft production both at home and abroad. The Ming dynasty is rightly famous for its fine ceramics and especially the cobalt blue-and-white porcelain produced in such towns as Jingdezhen in Jiangxi province. Still highly prized by collectors today, Ming porcelain would have a major influence on the ceramics of many other countries from Japan to Britain.
Evolution & Developments Through Chinese Porcelain Late Ming
Porcelain is only one of many different types of pottery but it is usually valued more than others because of the smoothness of its surface, its pure whiteness, and its translucent quality. Using a particular mix of clay and minerals and firing it at very high temperatures (1280-1400 ºC), porcelain had first been produced centuries earlier, but during the Ming, it was developed to new heights of perfection. The first driver of this evolution was the growth in home demand as ceramics, along with other crafts such as jade carving and lacquerware, finally began to rival painting and calligraphy as the most highly-prized of all the Chinese arts. As economic prosperity grew under the Ming, so the rich sought to express their new status not only by showing off art objects but also displaying a deep knowledge of it. Thus, connoisseurship developed and, consequently, the social status of fine artists also rose.SUCH WAS THE FAME OF CHINESE PORCELAIN THAT ALL FINE WHITE PORCELAIN WARES WERE OFTEN SIMPLY CALLED ‘CHINA’.
Jingdezhen (Chingtechen) has grabbed the headlines as the great centre of Ming porcelain but there were other pottery towns producing high-quality wares, notably Dehua and Foshan. Jingdezhen was the first such centre, though, and, thanks to rich local clay deposits, its production of pottery goes back to the Han Dynasty (206 BCE – 202 CE). The town produced pottery vessels for the emperors of the Tang Dynasty (618-907 CE), and by the time of the Ming, it had become one of the great industrial centres of China and probably one of the earliest in the world to reach such a scale of production. The imperial court was a major customer, regularly making huge orders of porcelain from this remote southern town.