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1) Pair of elaborately illustrated, matching jars with oriental character, in red box, on bottom. they went missing from a consignment shop. I'm trying to figure out what I lost and what the value might have been. 2)Elaborately illustrated matching pitcher/bowl, w birds/flowers & surprising range of other patterns. Lots of negative space. W/raised, gilded outlines. Evident crackelature. No mark. Happened to see pattern on an Imari plate whose complexity reminded me of this pitcher/bowl. Curious about the age and source of these two, too.

These are all late 20th century or subsequent decorative products of Chinese factories that specialize in the ornamentation of made-in-China ceramic blanks for export internationally. Most of the patterns are applied using machine-made transfers. In years past, principal producers were located mainly in Hong Kong and Macao, but now you'll find such wares made at other factories that have proliferated elsewhere in China and a number of countries in Southeast Asia as well. These products aren't always inexpensive when bought new in Western countries, but they have no value as antiques. At estate sales in the Southeastern USA where I'm located, tags for the pieces shown here would be written in tens of dollars, not hundreds.

Best regards,

Bill H.

Thank you for the information.
The two jars might be late 20th Century. Though my folks were antique dealers, not everything they purchased was antique. However, I am certain that your analysis did not apply to the matching bowl and pitcher. Please have another look at those. The crackalature suggests significant age. I suspect that an expect could readily identify the specific flora and fowl depicted and perhaps the style. They are quite consistent and distinctive.

The superficial texture of your pitcher and basin represents lengthy Chinese experience in catering to the Western penchant for taking such a crackled appearance to mean age instead of ingenuity in these ceramics. The trade-off here is that your set most likely is soft-paste stoneware and not highly vitrified porcelain, which is quite impervious to the development of age cracks when properly fired.

In other words, your pottery was fired in a manner especially meant to create the crackle, just as modern Satsuma-type wares comes out of Chinese (and Japanese) kilns looking to the uninitiated like they might have a century or more of age about them. However, a hundred years ago, a pitcher and basin like yours would have been about half as heavy, because they would have been true porcelain and not pottery.

Considering that Chinese porcelain decorators persisted for most of their history in painting and perpetuating patterns that were peculiarly Chinese, it probably wouldn't have occurred to a Qing or Republic-era Chinese porcelain painter to decorate a dish in this kind of quasi-Imari pattern. The Moriage slip-painted plum flowers and other Japanese-inspired touches look almost out of place around what might be the more mainstream Chinese-looking reserves of short-tailed birds among peonies except for them being done in a gaudy palette of colors, some of which hues probably weren't around in the 19th century.

I believe I am on fairly safe grounds in saying that this pattern was not produced in China before the late 20th century, and I'm even more certain in saying that the use of transfer decoration to mass-produce complicated designs such as this on ceramic wares was not practiced on a commercial scale in China until after 1912, in the Republic period.

Best regards,

Bill H.

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