Porcelain in Seventeenth-and Eighteenth-Century England

Porcelain is a white ceramic that originated in China and that incorporates kaolin clay.When Asian porcelains first appeared in Europe,Europeans were delighted and mystified by their lightness, hardness,and translucence (allowing light to pass through).Starting in the seventeenth century,Britain’s East India Company imported large quantities of goods from East Asia,with the volume of imported porcelain rising dramatically toward the end of that century and into the eighteenth.One reason for this increased importation of porcelain was the increasing popularity of the hot beverages coffee,chocolate, and tea.The earliest London coffeehouses date from the 1650s,and, though the first known advertisement for tea appeared in 1656,it was not imported by the East India Company for resale in Britain until 1678.The rising popularity of coffee drinking and tea drinking in Britain,and the vastly increased importation of Far East ceramics,are thus both phenomena that had their origins in high-class British social life during the last quarter of the seventeenth century.Being heavy and not susceptible to water damage,porcelain was packed underneath the very much lighter cargoes of tea brought by the East India Company.The histories of the two are thus closely intertwined, and the links extended from the act of importation to its sale-as porcelain dealers very often sold tea,coffee,and chocolate in addition to ceramics and glass-right through the final act of consumption.

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Porcelain was resistant to the thermal shock of contact with boiling water,but unlike silver (of which late-seventeenth-and early-eighteenth-century teapots continued to be made)it did not get uncomfortably hot.And being of Asian origin,it no doubt seemed the appropriate material from which to drink the teas imported by the East India Company.As importation increased,some of the mystery surrounding its production was dispelled.Indeed,its preparation was described in two letters by Pere D’Entrecolles,a Jesuit missionary resident at the great ceramic center of Jingdezhen,China,in 1712 and 1722.These letters were published in Paris in the 1720s and subsequently appeared in a work on China published in French and English editions in the 1730s.

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Although Asian wares had much to recommend them to seventeenth-and eighteenth-century Europeans,three characteristics in particular excited their admiration.Firstly,there were the physical qualities of the material itself,which was hard and white-bodied,and -most remarkable to Western eyes-could be translucent if thinly made.Secondly,the wares were technically superior to almost all of seventeenth-and eighteenth-century European ceramics,not allowing liquids to pass through and resistant to wear and tear. Finally,they came embellished with painted patterns in blue,or with brightly enameled decoration,the subjects and scenes of which must have appeared fascinating to Western eyes.

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The late-seventeenth-century taste for such exotic porcelain wares was part of a wider fashion that embraced Asian goods in other materials,including Chinese and Japanese lacquerware (household goods coated with a protective material made from tree resins),silks and fans,and printed cottons and embroideries from the Indian subcontinent.From the fact that such goods were brought to the West by European East India companies,imported decorative work of this type was frequently called “Indian”during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries since the geography and cultural diversity of Asia was very little understood by the European consumers in these years.Like the Indian cotton cloth known as calico,the majority of Chinese porcelains that found their way to the West during the eighteenth century were specially made for the Western market,very often after prototypes or design specifications supplied or laid down by European merchants.In the case of textiles,and to a lesser degree in ceramics,the designs with which they were embellished were also frequently based on Western reworkings of,or fantasies upon,Asian themes and decorative styles.The porcelain wares made to Western order and specifications were themselves copied and adapted in the ceramic factories of Europe,and some of these in due course made their way back to China,where they became the subject of further copying and variation.?

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?Porcelain is a white ceramic that originated in China and that incorporates kaolin clay.When Asian porcelains first appeared in Europe,Europeans were delighted and mystified by their lightness, hardness,and translucence (allowing light to pass through).Starting in the seventeenth century,Britain’s East India Company imported large quantities of goods from East Asia,with the volume of imported porcelain rising dramatically toward the end of that century and into the eighteenth.One reason for this increased importation of porcelain was the increasing popularity of the hot beverages coffee,chocolate, and tea.The earliest London coffeehouses date from the 1650s,and, though the first known advertisement for tea appeared in 1656,it was not imported by the East India Company for resale in Britain until 1678.The rising popularity of coffee drinking and tea drinking in Britain,and the vastly increased importation of Far East ceramics,are thus both phenomena that had their origins in high-class British social life during the last quarter of the seventeenth century.Being heavy and not susceptible to water damage,porcelain was packed underneath the very much lighter cargoes of tea brought by the East India Company.The histories of the two are thus closely intertwined, and the links extended from the act of importation to its sale-as porcelain dealers very often sold tea,coffee,and chocolate in addition to ceramics and glass-right through the final act of consumption.