#orientalceramicart

This set of portfolios entitled “Oriental Ceramic Art, illustrated by Examples from the Collection of W.T. Walters” contains one hundred and sixteen gorgeous chromolithograph plates created by Louis Prang. Prang (1824-1909) was a German immigrant who ran a highly successful printing firm in Boston during the late nineteenth century.

The publication features objects from the collection of successful businessman and art collector William Thompson Walters (1820-1894), which later formed the basis of the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, MD.

Each plate in the portfolios is accompanied by guard sheet with descriptive letterpress. In this post, we show you Plate 1 from Volume I with the guard sheet as well as the beautiful illustration of a porcelain vase underneath. Sang-de-boeuf is a deep red colored glaze that first appeared in Chinese porcelain at the start of the 18th century. The term is French, meaning “ox blood.”

Plate 1. Lang Yao Beaker. Beaker-shaped vase (Hua Ku), 16” high, enameled with the crackled glaze of the sang-de-boeuf mottled tints of the celebrated Lang Yao. The interior is coated with the same rich red glaze.

This is our second post from “Oriental Ceramic Art, illustrated by Examples from the Collection of W.T. Walters” (1897) to share some of the beautiful chromolithograph plates that we simply cannot get enough of. Yellow seems to be the right color to brighten a wintery day in New England especially after such stormy weather with strong wind and heavy rain yesterday.

Chromolithography is a method for making multi-color prints. This type of color printing stemmed from the process of lithography and involved the use of multiple lithographic stones, one for each color. The initial chromolithographic technique produced high quality results but was extremely expensive. As you can see in these plates, the colors are quite vivid, and the print quality is superior to 4-color process and halftones printing. (Summarized from Wikipedia)

This series has been reprinted in paperback, and you can also view digitized images from volume 2 of this set on the Internet Archive.

Plate V. Imperial Yellow Jar.

Jar (Kuan), nine inches high without the cover, enameled with a monochrome glaze of imperial yellow. The faint horizontal line in the middle indicates that the jar was originally fashioned upon the wheel in two pieces. There is a “mark” underneath, written in underglaze cobalt blue in large, bold characters, Ta Ch’ing K’ang-his nien chih – i.e., “Made in the reign of K’ang-his (1662-1722), of the great Ch’ing [dynasty]”