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Re: Re: Chinese Vase - Please Help Identify
Posted By: Bill H
Posted Date: Mar 01, 2011 (04:39 PM)
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On closer inspection, your sister's cylinder vase looks even more to be the late 20th century creation I'd suspected and the mark had indicated.

First there's the crackle, which is an anomalous ground on most true antique hard paste polychrome porcelain from China. However, the characteristic is common on blanks being overpainted and refired in sometimes poorly controlled kilns of 'offshore' decorating factories. Nowadays, a huge amount of Satsuma-type stoneware also is being manufactured and decorated on the Mainland in old motifs, which are passed off as both Japanese and Chinese antiques.

Second is the presence of rough ends on some petal tips, where decals were sloppily trimmed with scissors before being stuck to the surface for firing. China's porcelain industry did not employ such transfer decoration on a commercial scale until the 1920's or 30's.

Next we see those dots, which seem to serve no decorative or useful purpose at all unless it is to cover more obvious flaws.

Finally the muck: the scourge that I suspect must be a stinky, oily, grimy, sludgy source of cottage industry income for people who live near bilge-dumping spots on the Yangtze and harvest this gunk for use in mucking-up wares by postiche pottery purveyors who know how much we Western antique collectors dote on rattiness and filth as icons of antiquity. This practice is decidedly ironic considering most Chinese I know maintain their homes and contents quite fastidiously, or have progeny thoughtful enough to do it for them after a certain age.

If I seem to ascend a soapbox to rant about the filth aspect it is mostly theatrical, done in the hope these warning flags for novice antique porcelain collectors might be remembered as long as my rhetoric usually is. :)

Cheers,

Bill H.

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