Swatow ware

Swatow ware or Zhangzhou ware is a loose grouping of mainly late

Compared to contemporary

The most common subjects are birds in flight or at rest in or by water, and flowers. Animals, especially deer, set in a landscape are also common, as main subjects or in medallions in the border. Human figures are usually shown as staffage in landscapes, especially manning boats, but sometimes as a main subject. Other motifs are sea-monsters and dragons, both oddly-shaped. Some dishes have Islamic inscriptions in Arabic, intended for South East Asian Muslims rather than those further west. Some dishes show European ships, and represent Western ship's compasses. The designs show awareness of contemporary Jingdezhen porcelain, but at a considerable distance. Smaller numbers of pieces, often undecorated, are in a range of other background colours, especially blues and browns, usually achieved by slips, but also by applying coloured glazes all over.^[12]

The pieces very often have grit from the kiln on the glaze at the foot, indicating rather careless making.^[13] They were fired in dragon kilns of various designs, and the numerous potteries were small concerns, far removed from the industrial scale of Jingdezhen. Pieces were mostly wheel-thrown, but moulds were also used to form pieces.^[14]

The

A division of the blue and white wares into three "families" or broad groups has been proposed by Barbara Harrisson: "conservative", "persistent" and "versatile", in chronological order.^[20] This classification was further refined by Monique Crick in 2010 into three types of decoration: "Sketchy", "Composed", and "Full "rim-to-rim"".^[21] The "Sketchy decoration" group uses "a vigorous, brushed style, painted freehand and spontaneously" by a single artisan.^[22] The later groups often use drawing in dark concentrated blue to create the design, which is then overpainted with a lighter wash, in the same style that is often used with black and turquoise in the polychrome enamels. Some of these pieces have visible pin pricks indicating where a stencil was fixed, presumably allowing rapid painting of the wash. The outline would have needed to dry before the wash was applied, suggesting that a number of artisans were involved in different stages of production requiring different levels of skill.^[23]

The polychrome enamel wares may not have begun until the start of the 17th century, but then increased rapidly, forming about half of the Swatow pieces from the Binh Thuan wreck, which perhaps sank in 1608.^[24] The dishes were given a white slip coating, and fired at the high temperature necessary for porcelain, which would have burnt the coloured enamels. They were then painted before a short second firing at about 800 °C.^[25] Common palettes are red, green and (rather less) yellow,^[26] and turquoise, red, green and black. The black, mainly used for line-drawing, was actually made from the cobalt used for underglaze blue, in impure and concentrated form.^[27]

A relatively rare type is decorated in both underglaze blue and white and overglaze enamels. These pieces were expensive to produce and seem to have been made for the Japanese market.^[28] An example can be seen in the wall of dishes illustrated (D5).

Markets

Asia

Almost no examples of Swatow ware have been excavated in China itself, other than at the actual kiln sites, and it seems the wares were, like some other types, entirely made to export. The main markets were the islands of South-East Asia, especially modern Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines, together with Japan,^[29] such as those found in Nan'ao One. Other traditional markets for Chinese ceramics such as Korea and Vietnam seem not to be involved; they had already developed more traditional Chinese tastes favouring finely shaped monochrome wares or more delicately decorated styles. The dishes were used for display, and for dining; even royalty sat with guests on mats on the floor, eating communally from several large dishes, as early European visitors reported.^[30]

In Japan fragments have been found at prestigious castle and temple sites,^[31] and it seems that the rather crude vigour of the decoration appealed to the very sophisticated aesthetic sense of some Japanese tea-masters, leaders of taste at the time. The smaller bowls and jars were more easily utilized in the Japanese tea ceremony and other contexts, and some Japanese pieces imitated Swatow shapes and decoration.^[32]

A wreck off the south coast of

European markets were probably much less significant, and the

The Spanish, who were settled at Manila in the Philippines, carried goods including Chinese luxuries between there and New World ports such as Acapulco in the Manila galleon trade. Swatow ware has been recovered from several Spanish sites and wrecks, including Sebastião Rodrigues Soromenho's San Agustin, wrecked in 1595 at Drakes Bay, just north of San Francisco.^[37]

The Dutch East India Company, founded in 1602, traded with Indonesia, a major market for the wares. They were not allowed to trade directly with China, and contented themselves with capturing any Portuguese, Spanish and Chinese vessels they could, and probably arranging deliveries to their bases by Chinese ships. From 1624 they had a base on

The pieces have remained appreciated in their original markets, especially in Indonesia and Japan, where there are several good collections.^[41] They were generally not collected by the Chinese and most Western and Chinese museums with good collections of ceramics have sparse holdings.^[42] The Dutch Princessehof Ceramics Museum has an exceptional collection of some 170 pieces,^[43] with "the most representative range of the type",^[44] though in terms of shapes it concentrates on the large dishes.^[45] This was originally assembled in Indonesia by a Dutch colonial administrator in the 19th century.

• 
  A typical design centering on water birds, outline and wash in cobalt blue.
• 
  Dish with Qu'ran verse, prayer, and professions of faith. Such designs were used for courtly welcome ceremonies in the Islamic islands.^[46]
• 
  Foliated dish with landscape
• 
  Detail of the "split pagoda" motif. A different dish to that shown above; this one from the Princessehof Ceramics Museum
• 
  Swatow porcelain

  blue and white

  style, before 1600
• 
  Detail. The "sketchy" dish at lower right has a main human figure.
• 
  Detail of bird among flowers
• 
  Another wall of dishes in the Princessehof Ceramics Museum
• 
  Yellow-glazed olive-shaped vase, for the domestic market

Notes

References

• "Grove" Oxford Art Online, section "Swatow wares" in "China, §VIII, 3.6: Ceramics: Historical development", by Medley, Margaret
• ISBN 185177632X
  , 9781851776320
• Medley, Margaret, The Chinese Potter: A Practical History of Chinese Ceramics, 3rd edition, 1989, Phaidon,
  ISBN 071482593X
• ISBN 9814260134, 9789814260138, google books
• Ströber, Eva, The Collection of Zhangzhou Ware at the Princessehof Museum, Leeuwarden, Netherlands, PDF (60 pages)
• Vainker, S. J., Chinese Pottery and Porcelain, 1991, British Museum Press,
  ISBN 9780714114705

• Media related to Swatow ware at Wikimedia Commons
• A Handbook of Chinese Ceramics from The Metropolitan Museum of Art