Description

Although there are good examples of clear, if altered, white glass, China is better known for coloured varieties. By adding metallic oxides and other substances to clear glass, craftsmen produced vessels of deep and brilliant hues: sapphire blue (cobalt), emerald green (copper silicate or chromium), amber (iron or sulphur), amethyst (manganese), ruby (copper or gold). Their aim was to reproduce the brilliance and intensity of the gemstones by which we identify their work. Yet such clear vessels, no matter how beautiful, may have seemed to more traditional Chinese like 'glaze standing naked, without a body,' so rich was the ceramic tradition of China, and so strange to Chinese everyday usage was glass. There is another category of glass, however - a group of opaque glass vessels and ornaments in pastel shades achieved through the use of tin or antimony. Many of these resemble porcelain or celadon-glazed stonewares. A favoured colour in this group was 'imperial' or antimony yellow. Yellow was the colour associated with the Manchu dynasty, confined originally like the five-clawed dragon, to imperial use but, like the dragon, gradually cropping up in less exalted contexts as well. Not all yellow glass items were made to imperial order, but it seems possible that this fine pair of vases was made for a palace. On each side of each vase is a different scene or representation, rendered as mirror images so that they complement each other when the vases are seen together. The images are engraved on the glass, and the linework then gilded, as in some jade screens also of eighteenth-century date. The four repeated, informal scenes are: two birds in a fragmentary landscape; a figure in a hermitage by a mountain; a scholar and a boy in a boat among reeds; and a fisherman between high and low banks of a river.